philosophical essay on beauty

Beauty as a Philosophical Concept Essay

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Beauty can be considered one of the most powerful and most disputable forces that have always inspired people, moved them, and preconditioned serious changes in societies. The importance of the given phenomenon can be evidenced by the fact that there have always been multiple attempts to determine beauty and introduce a sample that could be followed (Sartwell). However, all these attempts failed because of the changeable and relative character of this notion. Every period in the history of humanity has its own vision of beauty. Ancient Greek statues, drawings of the renaissance, or modern photos try to express this idea and emphasize the visual appeal. However, beauty is not just lines and forms, as it includes many other dimensions.

Attempts to determine this phenomenon also resulted in the appearance of the idea that a truly beautiful person should combine both physical attraction and a rich inner world to be appreciated by peers. In such a way, the term becomes broader, as only shapes of the body cannot suffice and provide a clear answer to the question. In other words, beauty can also be found in the character of a person, his/her actions, beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts.

That is why one can conclude that the concept of beauty is one of the most sophisticated ideas that remain disputable even today. Considering the information provided above, it can be determined as a set of shapes of the body, forms, and lines, along with the inner qualities and peculiarities of the character that are considered attractive at the moment by the majority of society members. However, this definition remains extremely simple and relative as it does not take into account other dimensions and millions of meanings peculiar to this very phenomenon.

Sartwell, Crispin, “ Beauty .” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Web.

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Beauty is a concept that has been captivating the minds of people since ancient times. Philosophers, artists, and writers have sought to define beauty in a myriad of ways, yet it remains an elusive concept that is difficult to comprehend fully. In this article, we will explore the philosophical ideas and concepts related to beauty and its various interpretations. We will delve into the works of famous philosophers and examine the various theories on beauty and its role in society. The philosophy of beauty is an intriguing field of study that touches upon many aspects of life.

From the aesthetics of art to the nature of beauty in the human form, it encompasses a wide range of topics. We will consider how beauty has been viewed through the ages, from the ancient Greeks to modern thinkers, and examine some of the key philosophical theories on beauty. We will also explore how beauty is experienced and interpreted by different individuals and cultures, and consider how beauty has been used in literature and other forms of art. Ultimately, this article will provide an insightful examination into the philosophy of beauty and its various implications. The concept of beauty has been around for thousands of years, and has been interpreted in many different ways by different thinkers throughout history. Beauty is often seen as a subjective concept, with each individual having their own unique definition of what beauty is and what it means to them.

However, there are also some common ideas about what beauty is and how it affects our lives. The definition of beauty is often linked to symmetry and balance, with many philosophers and thinkers arguing that there is an inherent beauty in things that are symmetrical or balanced. This concept can be seen in the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who argued that the idea of beauty was based on proportion and harmony. This idea has been echoed by many other philosophers throughout history, including Immanuel Kant, who argued that beauty was based on the principle of “purposiveness without a purpose”.

Beauty is also often linked to aesthetic judgments, which involve making judgments about the aesthetic qualities of things. This can be seen in the work of the 18th century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, who argued that beauty was an important factor in making aesthetic judgments about works of art. This idea has been taken up by many other thinkers since, including the 20th century philosopher Nelson Goodman, who argued that aesthetic judgments were based on a combination of beauty and other qualities such as complexity, order, and novelty. The implications of beauty for our understanding of art and creativity are also significant.

Many thinkers throughout history have argued that beauty is an important factor in understanding art and creativity, with some arguing that the appreciation of beauty can lead to a deeper understanding of art and creativity. This idea has been echoed by the 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who argued that beauty was an essential part of understanding art and creativity. The relationship between beauty and other aesthetic concepts such as ugliness and symmetry is also an important one. Ugliness can be seen as the opposite of beauty, while symmetry can be seen as a way to create balance in a piece of art or design.

Both concepts have been explored by thinkers throughout history, including Plato, who argued that ugliness was an important factor in understanding art and creativity. The role of beauty in different cultures and societies is also significant. Different cultures have different views on what constitutes beauty, with some seeing it as an important factor in how people interact with each other and their environment. This idea has been explored by many thinkers throughout history, including the 19th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that beauty was an important factor in determining how people view themselves and their environment.

Finally, the philosophical implications of beauty for our understanding of reality are significant. Many philosophers throughout history have argued that our perception of beauty can help us gain insights into the nature of reality. This idea has been explored by thinkers such as Plato and Kant, who argued that our appreciation of beauty can lead to a deeper understanding of reality. In conclusion, it is clear that the concept of beauty has played an important role in our understanding of art and creativity throughout history.

Ugliness and Symmetry

In contrast, ugliness is often seen as a lack of symmetry and an absence of perfection, leading to an aesthetic judgment that something is not beautiful. However, more recent philosophers have challenged this traditional view, arguing that beauty is not necessarily linked to perfection or symmetry. For instance, Immanuel Kant argued that beauty is the result of free play between imagination and understanding, suggesting that beauty can be found in forms that are not necessarily symmetrical or perfect. Similarly, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that beauty is based on individual taste, suggesting that what one person finds beautiful may not be seen as beautiful by another person.

The Meaning of Beauty

Aristotle argued that beauty is based on the 'golden mean', which refers to a balance between two extremes. This suggests that beauty lies in moderation and harmony, not in extremes. Plato argued that beauty was an idea, or a form, which exists outside of physical reality and is beyond the reach of our senses. In the Middle Ages, beauty was seen as something that was divinely inspired.

Implications for Art and Creativity

But it has also been used to consider how beauty affects our understanding of art and creativity. From the Romantic period onwards, beauty has been seen as an essential part of artistic expression and creativity. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that beauty was a necessary part of creative works, and that it should be included in all artistic pursuits. He believed that beauty should be the primary focus of art, not just an afterthought or something to be added in later.

Kant's view of beauty is still influential today, and it implies that art should be beautiful in order to be considered truly creative. Other philosophers, such as John Dewey, have argued that beauty is not a prerequisite for art. Dewey argued that art should be focused on form and expression rather than on beauty, and that art should be judged on its own merits rather than on whether or not it is aesthetically pleasing. This view implies that art can still be considered creative even if it isn't necessarily beautiful. Beauty also has implications for our understanding of creativity. According to Kant, creativity is linked to beauty since it is only through beauty that we can truly appreciate creative works.

Beauty in Different Cultures and Societies

For example, some cultures prioritize physical beauty, such as a person's facial symmetry, while others emphasize spiritual or mental attributes. Additionally, standards of beauty have changed over time and will continue to do so in the future. In many cultures, beauty has been associated with power, status, and wealth. For instance, in ancient Egypt, beauty was linked to the divine, with wealthy and powerful people striving to emulate the gods and goddesses they worshipped.

In other parts of the world, such as Africa, beauty was often associated with fertility. This is still evident today in the use of colorful clothing, jewelry, and makeup to enhance a woman's appearance. In modern society, beauty has become more about self-expression and individual style. People use makeup and fashion to express themselves and stand out from the crowd.

In some cases, people use beauty as a form of resistance against oppressive systems. For example, African-American women may choose to wear natural hairstyles as a form of empowerment. Ultimately, beauty is an ever-evolving concept that has no single definition. It is rooted in culture and tradition and is always changing to fit the current trends and norms of society.

Philosophical Implications

This idea has been used to make aesthetic judgments, or judgments about what is beautiful and what is not. The idea of beauty as an ideal has also been used to explore the idea of creativity and art, as something that can be appreciated regardless of its context. The philosophical implications of beauty are wide-ranging and complex. Beauty has been seen as evidence of the existence of a higher power or divine essence, as a way to understand truth and knowledge, and as a way to appreciate art and creativity in a more meaningful way. Beauty can also be seen as an expression of our humanity, as a reflection of our values and beliefs.

Aesthetic Judgments

In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant introduced a new way of thinking about beauty that focused less on objective measures and more on subjective feelings. He argued that beauty was something that could not be objectively measured, but instead should be judged based on its ability to evoke feelings of pleasure in the viewer. In the 20th century, a new approach to aesthetic judgments emerged known as formalism. This approach saw beauty as something that could be objectively measured by looking at a work's formal characteristics such as its line, shape, texture, color, etc.

Today, there is an increased focus on context when making aesthetic judgments. Beauty is now seen as something that is determined by its context and its impact on the viewer. It is no longer just about objective qualities but also about how it affects people emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. The concept of beauty has evolved over time, and our understanding of it has changed as well.

Understanding this evolution helps us to better understand how beauty is used to make aesthetic judgments today. Beauty is a complex concept that has been interpreted in different ways throughout history. In this article, we explored its meaning, aesthetic judgments, implications for art and creativity, ugliness and symmetry, beauty in different cultures and societies, and its philosophical implications. We have seen that beauty is a subjective concept which is shaped by cultural norms and values and that it can be used to make aesthetic judgments. Ultimately, beauty is an ever-evolving concept that has been shaped by the changing times and cultures in which we live. It is up to us to determine what beauty truly means and how it can be used to enrich our lives.

So take a moment to reflect on what beauty means to you and how you can use it to create a more beautiful world .

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What Is Beauty? (Philosophy)

The concept of beauty has been a major theme in Western philosophy for centuries. It is a subject that has captivated the minds of ancient Greek, Hellenistic, medieval, and modern philosophers alike. Beauty is often discussed in relation to other fundamental values such as goodness, truth, and justice, and has been a source of inspiration and contemplation for thinkers throughout history.

So, what is beauty? How do we define it? The meaning of beauty can be elusive, as it encompasses a range of diverse interpretations and perspectives. Beauty is not solely confined to physical appearance, but also extends to art, nature, and the experiences that evoke a sense of aesthetic pleasure.

Beauty can be seen as a quality that brings delight and evokes positive emotions. It is both a subjective experience, influenced by personal preferences and individual perception, and an objective characteristic, rooted in the qualities that make something aesthetically pleasing. The interplay between subjectivity and objectivity in defining beauty is a topic of ongoing philosophical discourse.

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Key Takeaways:

• Beauty is a central theme in Western philosophy.
• It encompasses subjective and objective aspects.
• Beauty is not solely confined to physical appearance.
• It can be experienced through art, nature, and aesthetic pleasure.
• Philosophers have explored different perspectives on the meaning of beauty.

Table of Contents

The Objectivity and Subjectivity of Beauty

One of the most debated topics in the philosophy of beauty is whether it is subjective or objective. Some argue that beauty is purely subjective and dependent on individual perception, while others believe there are objective qualities that make something beautiful. Ancient and medieval philosophers generally viewed beauty as objective, while philosophers like Hume and Kant emphasized the subjective nature of beauty. However, there is also a recognition that beauty is often experienced and appreciated in similar ways by different individuals.

Objective Beauty

In the realm of objective beauty , proponents argue that there are inherent and measurable qualities that determine the beauty of an object or work of art. These qualities may include symmetry, proportion, harmony, and balance. According to this perspective, beauty can be objectively evaluated based on these criteria, and certain objects possess inherent beauty regardless of individual perception.

Subjective Beauty

On the other hand, the subjective nature of beauty suggests that beauty is determined by personal taste, cultural influences, and individual experiences. Beauty is seen as a subjective experience that varies from person to person. What one person finds beautiful, another may not. This interpretation acknowledges that beauty is influenced by personal preferences, emotions, and perceptions.

Beauty perception is influenced by various factors, including cultural background, aesthetic education, and personal experiences. Different cultures and societies often have their own unique standards of beauty, shaping individuals’ perceptions and influencing societal expectations.

While the debate between objective and subjective beauty may never be definitively settled, it is clear that both perspectives contribute to our understanding of aesthetics. Beauty can be appreciated and experienced in multiple ways, encompassing both objective qualities and subjective interpretations.

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Philosophical Conceptions of Beauty

Throughout history, philosophers have proposed various conceptions of beauty. These philosophical perspectives provide different insights into the nature of beauty and how it is understood. Let’s explore three significant conceptions: the Classical conception, the Idealist conception, and the Hedonist conceptions of beauty .

The Classical Conception of Beauty

Influenced by the ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the Classical conception of beauty emphasizes objective qualities such as proportion, harmony, and symmetry. According to this perspective, beauty is not merely subjective but can be objectively recognized and appreciated. The Classical conception suggests that there are inherent standards of beauty that exist beyond individual preferences and cultural biases.

The Idealist Conception of Beauty

The Idealist conception, exemplified by thinkers like Plotinus, approaches beauty from a metaphysical standpoint. It attributes beauty to the realm of Forms, emphasizing the participation of objects in these abstract entities. In this conception, beauty is seen as a transcendental quality that transcends the physical world. The Idealist perspective suggests that beauty lies in the inherent essence and perfection of an object, beyond its physical appearance.

The Hedonist Conceptions of Beauty

Contrasting the Classical and Idealist perspectives, Hedonist conceptions of beauty focus on the pleasure and sensory experiences associated with beauty. According to Hedonism, beauty is subjective and dependent on individual pleasure and desire. This perspective suggests that beauty can be found in experiences that elicit aesthetic enjoyment and sensory gratification.

Each of these philosophical conceptions offers a unique lens through which to understand and appreciate beauty. The Classical conception highlights the objective qualities of beauty, the Idealist conception delves into its metaphysical dimension, and the Hedonist conceptions explore the subjective pleasure of beauty. By considering these different perspectives, we gain a more holistic understanding of the diverse ways in which beauty is conceptualized and experienced.

The Politics of Beauty

Beauty is not only a philosophical concept but also holds political significance. Throughout history, beauty has been tied to social hierarchies and power dynamics. The association between beauty and aristocracy has been prevalent, with the upper classes often being seen as the epitome of beauty. This dynamic reinforces societal inequalities and perpetuates exclusivity in defining beauty standards .

A feminist critique of beauty challenges these traditional beauty standards and explores how they are influenced by social construction and gender norms. It questions the narrow definitions of beauty that have been imposed on women and emphasizes the importance of embracing diverse forms of aesthetic expression. This critique aims to dismantle the oppressive beauty ideals that contribute to unrealistic expectations and the objectification of women.

Furthermore, beauty has been used as a tool of colonialism, with Eurocentric ideals being imposed on non-Western societies. This cultural imperialism has led to the erasure of indigenous beauty standards and the marginalization of non-European aesthetics. It is essential to recognize and celebrate the beauty diversity across different cultures and to challenge the dominance of Eurocentric beauty ideals.

However, beauty can also be a form of resistance. Challenging dominant narratives and celebrating diverse forms of aesthetic expression can empower individuals and communities. By embracing their unique beauty, marginalized groups can assert their identities and challenge the oppressive beauty standards imposed upon them.

In order to understand the politics of beauty, it is crucial to acknowledge the ways in which beauty is intertwined with systems of power, privilege, and oppression. By questioning and challenging societal beauty norms, we can strive towards a more inclusive and equitable understanding of beauty.

Beauty in Society

Beauty is deeply intertwined with society and its cultural norms. Across different cultures and societies, beauty standards vary, reflecting the unique values and preferences of each. These beauty standards often dictate what is considered desirable and attractive within a given society.

In some cultures, certain physical features or characteristics are regarded as more beautiful than others. For example, in Western societies, there is often an emphasis on thinness and youth as beauty standards. On the other hand, in some African cultures, fuller figures may be prized as a symbol of beauty and fertility.

These cultural beauty norms shape individuals’ perceptions and influence societal expectations. They can affect self-esteem and self-worth, as individuals strive to meet the prescribed beauty standards. Furthermore, the portrayal of these beauty ideals in media and advertising can perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards and narrow definitions of attractiveness.

However, it is important to recognize that beauty is subjective and can vary widely based on cultural context. What is considered beautiful in one culture may not align with the beauty standards of another culture. Embracing diverse beauty norms and celebrating different forms of aesthetic expression is essential in promoting inclusivity and breaking free from restrictive beauty standards.

Table: Cultural Beauty Norms in Different Regions

The Importance of Beauty

Beauty is not just a superficial concept; it holds significant importance in our lives and has a profound impact on our well-being. The presence of beauty can evoke a variety of positive emotions and inspire us to look at the world with fresh eyes.

When we encounter something beautiful, whether it’s a work of art, a breathtaking landscape, or even a well-designed product, it has the power to captivate our senses and uplift our spirits. Beauty stimulates our imagination and creativity, encouraging us to think beyond the ordinary and explore new possibilities.

Moreover, beauty has the ability to bring us joy and create a harmonious environment. When we surround ourselves with aesthetically pleasing elements, such as a well-decorated space or a beautifully arranged garden, it can enhance our mood and overall sense of well-being.

It’s also worth noting that beauty can be found in the simplest of things in our everyday lives. From the delicate petals of a flower to the symmetrical patterns on a butterfly’s wings, beauty surrounds us in countless forms. Taking the time to appreciate these small moments of beauty can bring us a deeper sense of connection to the world around us and foster a greater appreciation for life itself.

The Impact of Beauty on our Well-being

Research has shown that exposure to beauty can have various positive effects on our well-being. This includes reducing stress levels, improving cognitive function, and enhancing our overall quality of life. When we engage with beauty, whether by visiting an art museum, spending time in nature, or enjoying a well-curated space, it can provide a sense of tranquility and inner calm.

Beauty has also been found to promote social connections, bringing people together through shared aesthetic experiences. It serves as a common ground for individuals to connect, appreciate, and discuss the beauty they see, fostering a sense of community and human connection.

The Importance of Beauty in Everyday Life

By recognizing and embracing the importance of beauty in our everyday lives, we can cultivate a greater appreciation for the world around us and seek out opportunities to engage with beauty in various forms.

Beauty and Subjectivity

Beauty is a concept that can be both objective and subjective, but ultimately, it is the subjective experience that holds the most significance. Each individual has their unique perception and interpretation of beauty, making it a deeply personal and subjective matter. What one person finds beautiful may not necessarily be the same for another, and that’s the beauty of it. It allows for diverse expressions and interpretations, encouraging individuality and personal preferences.

Subjectivity in beauty means that there are no fixed or universal standards that determine what is beautiful. It is a fluid and ever-evolving concept that varies from person to person. Beauty is not confined to physical appearances or societal norms; rather, it encompasses a vast array of elements, including emotions, experiences, and aesthetics.

This subjectivity opens the door to a world of individual choice and interpretation. It allows individuals to appreciate and find beauty in things that resonate with their own personal experiences and values. Whether it’s a visually captivating artwork, a melodious piece of music, or the serene beauty of nature, beauty perception is a deeply personal experience.

Furthermore, beauty subjectivity encourages the celebration of diversity and uniqueness. It emphasizes the importance of appreciating and respecting different perspectives and aesthetics. The subjective nature of beauty fosters an inclusive environment where everyone’s unique perception and interpretation can coexist harmoniously.

The Diversity of Beauty Perception

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

This popular phrase captures the essence of beauty subjectivity . Beauty perception is not limited to one standard or definition; it encompasses a multitude of viewpoints. Different people find beauty in different places, objects, or experiences. What one person considers beautiful may not resonate with another.

In essence, beauty is a reflection of personal taste and experiences. It is influenced by cultural backgrounds, upbringing, education, and individual preferences. Beauty perception is deeply rooted in our unique perspectives, and it embraces the richness of diverse interpretations.

Here is an example to illustrate the diversity of beauty perception:

As shown in the table above, different individuals have distinct perceptions of beauty. Sarah finds beauty in the majestic mountains, while Michael appreciates the bustling cityscape. Lisa is captivated by the delicate beauty of flowers, and David is drawn to the abstract forms and colors of art. Each person’s perception is equally valid and unique, showcasing the subjective nature of beauty.

Ultimately, beauty subjectivity gives us the freedom to explore and appreciate the multitude of aesthetic experiences that the world has to offer. It invites us to embrace our own personal preferences and celebrate the diversity of beauty perception.

Embracing Beauty Subjectivity

In a world where beauty standards often dominate media and societal norms, it is essential to remember that beauty is subjective. Recognizing the subjectivity of beauty allows us to break free from rigid expectations and embrace our own unique perspectives.

By embracing beauty subjectivity, we empower ourselves to define and appreciate beauty on our terms. We can find beauty in the small moments of everyday life, in the simple joys that bring us happiness. From a breathtaking sunset to a heartfelt smile, beauty is all around us, waiting to be acknowledged and cherished.

While objective aspects of beauty may exist, such as symmetry or harmony, it is the subjective experience that truly matters. It is the personal connection and emotional response that beauty elicits within us. By embracing beauty subjectivity, we open ourselves up to a world of discovery and appreciation.

By celebrating the diversity of beauty perception, we foster inclusivity and respect for different viewpoints. We can learn from one another and gain new insights into what is beautiful. This understanding cultivates a greater appreciation for the multiplicity of aesthetics and encourages us to challenge traditional beauty norms.

Beauty subjectivity invites us to question societal standards and redefine beauty in our own terms. It encourages us to celebrate individuality and embrace diverse forms of aesthetic expression. In doing so, we create a more inclusive, accepting, and beautiful world.

The concept of beauty is a fascinating and complex subject that has intrigued philosophers and society alike for centuries. From ancient Greece to modern times, beauty has been the focus of philosophical debates, with varying perspectives on its nature and significance.

Beauty encompasses both subjective and objective aspects, with different conceptions and interpretations. While there are cultural norms and societal values that influence our understanding of beauty, personal preferences and individual perception also play a crucial role. It is this blend of subjectivity and objectivity that makes beauty such a captivating and enigmatic concept.

Beauty holds great importance in our lives, as it shapes our perception of the world and has a profound impact on our well-being. It is through beauty that we find inspiration, evoke emotions, and experience aesthetic pleasure. Whether it is found in art, nature, or everyday experiences, beauty has the power to uplift our spirits and create a more harmonious environment.

Understanding beauty requires a nuanced understanding of its philosophical underpinnings and its diverse manifestations in society. By exploring the rich history and different perspectives on beauty, we can gain a deeper appreciation for its significance in our lives and broaden our horizons. In the realm of beauty, there is always room for exploration and contemplation, as it continues to inspire us and enrich our understanding of the world around us.

What is the definition of beauty?

Is beauty subjective or objective, what are the different philosophical conceptions of beauty, how is beauty tied to society and politics, are beauty standards the same across different cultures, what is the importance of beauty in our lives, is beauty a subjective experience, related posts.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Beauty

Introduction, anthologies and reference works.

• The Sensuous and Desire
• Beauty and Art
• Beauty and Disinterest
• Beauty and Nature
• Beauty Contested
• Beauty Experienced
• Beauty and Evaluation
• Beauty and Aesthetic Form
• Beauty and Autonomy
• Beauty and the Form of Perfection
• Aesthetic Judgement and Community
• Beauty and Truth
• Beauty and Value Theory
• Beauty and Morality
• Beauty Naturalized

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• Aesthetic Hedonism
• Analytic Approaches to Aesthetics
• Analytic Approaches to Pornography and Objectification
• Analytic Philosophy of Music
• Analytic Philosophy of Photography
• Art and Emotion
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• Environmental Aesthetics
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Aesthetics
• History of Aesthetics
• Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics and Teleology
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Beauty by Jennifer A. McMahon LAST REVIEWED: 26 April 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 31 July 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0038

Philosophical interest in beauty began with the earliest recorded philosophers. Beauty was deemed to be an essential ingredient in a good life and so what it was, where it was to be found, and how it was to be included in a life were prime considerations. The way beauty has been conceived has been influenced by an author’s other philosophical commitments―metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical―and such commitments reflect the historical and cultural position of the author. For example, beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth to which we respond with love and adoration; beauty is a harmony of the soul that we achieve through cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way; beauty is an idea raised in us by certain objective features of the world; beauty is a sentiment that can nonetheless be cultivated to be appropriate to its object; beauty is the object of a judgement by which we exercise the social, comparative, and intersubjective elements of cognition, and so on. Such views on beauty not only reveal underlying philosophical commitments but also reflect positive contributions to understanding the nature of value and the relation between mind and world. One way to distinguish between beauty theories is according to the conception of the human being that they assume or imply, for example, where they fall on the continuum from determinism to free will, ungrounded notions of compatibilism notwithstanding. For example, theories at the latter end might carve out a sense of genuine innovation and creativity in human endeavors while at the other end of the spectrum authors may conceive of beauty as an environmental trigger for consumption, procreation, or preservation in the interests of the individual. Treating beauty experiences as in some respect intentional, characterizes beauty theory prior to the 20th century and since, mainly in historically inspired writing on beauty. However, treating beauty as affect or sensation has always had its representatives and is most visible today in evolutionary-inspired accounts of beauty (though not all evolutionary accounts fit this classification). Beauty theory falls under some combination of metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics, and psychology. Although during the 20th century beauty was more likely to be conceived as an evaluative concept for art, recent philosophical interest in beauty can again be seen to exercise arguments pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, philosophy of meaning, and language in addition to philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics. This work has been funded by an Australian Research Council Grant: DP150103143 (Taste and Community).

Anthologies on beauty that bring together writers who, while they may discuss art, do so in the main only to reveal our capacity for beauty, include the excellent selection of historical readings collected in the one-volume Hofstadter and Kuhns 1976 and the more culturally inclusive collection Cooper 1997 . Recent anthologies on beauty can take the form of a study of aesthetic value, such as in Schaper 1983 , or more specifically on the ethical dimension of aesthetic value, such as in Hagberg 2008 . Reference works in philosophical aesthetics today tend to focus on the philosophy of art and criticism. They typically include one chapter on beauty, and in this context Mothersill 2004 treats beauty as an evaluative category for art; and in keeping with this approach, Mothersill 2009 recommends a historically informed understanding of the concept beauty derived from Hegel. A recent trend toward environmental aesthetics brings us back to beauty as a property of the natural world, as in Zangwill 2003 , while McMahon 2005 responds to empirical trends by treating beauty as a value compatible with naturalization. The comprehensive entry “ Beauty ” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is divided into four parts. It begins with Stephen David Ross’s brief but excellent summary of the history of concepts that underpin beauty theory and philosophical aesthetics more broadly. It is followed by Nickolas Pappas’s dedicated section on classical concepts of beauty, and then Jan A. Aertsen’s section on medieval concepts of beauty. The entry concludes with Nicholas Riggle’s discussion of beauty and love, which introduces contemporary themes to the topic. Guyer 2014 analyzes historical trends in approaches to beauty theory in a way that sets up illuminating contrasts to contemporary perspectives.

“Beauty.” In Abhinavagupta–Byzantine Aesthetics . Vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Michael Kelly. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

In the course of setting out the historical foundations to the concept beauty, we are provided with an excellent summary of the key concepts that still dominate or underpin philosophical aesthetics, including pleasure, desire, the good, disinterest, taste, value, and love. Available at Oxford Art Online by subscription.

Cooper, David. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings . Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Introductions are provided to some of the classic readings on beauty followed by an extract from the relevant work. They are discussed in terms of their relevance to understanding art rather than value more generally.

Guyer, Paul. A History of Modern Aesthetics . 3 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Guyer traces the development of key concepts in aesthetics, including beauty, within a context of broader scaled trends, such as aesthetics of truth in the ancient world, aesthetics of emotion and imagination in the 18th century, and aesthetics of meaning and significance in the 20th century.

Hagberg, Garry I., ed. Art and Ethical Criticism . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444302813

A series of papers on the ethical dimension of art, the authors draw out the ethical significance of a particular art/literary/musical work or art form. It is worth noting that the lead essay by Paul Guyer argues that 18th-century writers on beauty did not hold any concepts incompatible with this approach.

Hofstadter, Albert, and Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Well-chosen readings from classic works, with commentary provided, marred occasionally by the editors’ anachronistic emphasis on art. The readings provide a good introduction to various conceptions of beauty as a general value.

McMahon, Jennifer A. “Beauty.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes, 307–319. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

A historical overview drawing out the contrast between sensuous- and formal/value-oriented approaches to beauty, culminating in the contrast between Freud’s pleasure principle and the constructivist approach of cognitive science.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment: Remapping Aesthetics.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics . Edited by Peter Kivy, 152–166. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

DOI: 10.1002/9780470756645

Setting out the change in focus in philosophical aesthetics between the 19th and 20th century, Mothersill then proceeds to analyze beauty with a view to its significance for understanding aesthetic value in relation to art.

Mothersill, Mary. “Beauty.” In A Companion to Aesthetics . 2d ed. Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper, 166–171. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Mothersill considers the contributions made by key historical figures before settling on Hegel’s historicism as providing the most helpful insight for the present context. Available online.

Schaper, Eva, ed. Pleasure, Preference and Value . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

A series of essays by prominent philosophers on the nature of aesthetic value, which are very useful as an introduction to the study of value theory, including essays on taste, pleasure, aesthetic interest, aesthetic realism, and aesthetic objectivity.

Zangwill, Nick. “Beauty.” In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics . Edited by Jerrold Levinson, 325–343. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

An introduction to the tradition of analytic approaches to value theory, beauty is analyzed into its components and relationships, and its status considered in terms of subjectivity and objectivity.

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People argue whether beauty is objective or subjective. But what would it mean for it to be one or the other? A good example of something subjective would be:  tasting good to Bob . If something tastes good to Bob, it’s because of Bob’s subjective experience of it. It depends on the  subject . An objective property would be:  being 5 kg . Anything 5 kg has that mass independently of any subjective experience of it. It’s in the  object . Tomorrow’s episode of Philosophy Talk is on athletic beauty—beauty in sports. So I decided to write this blog on beauty in general to pave the way for tomorrow’s discussion.

Is being beautiful like tasting good to Bob (subjective) or being 5 kg (objective)? The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” suggests subjective. But other sayings—“beauty is truth” or “beauty is eternal”—suggest there is some objective quality to beauty. Advocates of the subjective view emphasize how difficult it is to get people to agree on aesthetic judgments. Advocates of the objective view make arguments like: “The Grand Canyon would be beautiful regardless of whether anyone was there to see it, so beauty is in the object.” Both kinds of advocate are given to more than occasional question-begging.

How we come down on the question of objectivity vs. subjectivity will make a big difference to how we view the experiences of things like sports and music. But before getting into the metaphysics of beauty, I want to make a simple linguistic point. The word “beauty” (and cognates) can be used to make objective claims (claims whose truth is meant to be determined by the object referred to) or subjective claims (claims whose truth is meant to be determined by one’s subjective experience). It can work both ways .

Here’s what I mean.

Often I listen to a piece of music and don’t like it at first. But then later I come to believe, and say, that the music is “beautiful,” even though I didn’t realize it at first. I’ve gone through this process with songs from Shostakovich to Radiohead. And when I claim that the music is beautiful—finally, after hearing it many times—I’m saying that the music has something I wasn’t aware of at first. That property, I seem to be saying, was discovered by me, not constituted by my subjective experience. I was wrong when I missed it at first. When I use the word “beautiful” to indicate something I missed the first time around, I’m using it to make an objective claim about the music . So it seems to be a linguistic fact that “beautiful” can be used to make objective claims.

On the other hand, I once had a friend with a mangy cat who would always say, “She’s beautiful to me .” Plainly there’s some sense to my friend’s words, but they would be silly if “beautiful” were supposed to denote some objective property. You’d be hard-pressed to find something objectively beautiful about that mangy cat, but I don’t think that means my friend said something false. That the claim is subjective is indicated by the phrase “to me”: the truth of the claim is determined by the subject’s experience.

So there are at least two senses of “beauty”—one objective and the other subjective. (See this PT blog by Alexander Nehamas for a closely related view.) What, if anything, unifies these two senses? It is not as if the two senses of “beauty” are unrelated, like the senses of “bank” (of a river) and “bank” (the financial institution). I hold that what unifies the two senses is that objects that are truly “beautiful” (in either sense) give rise to a certain kind of experience . I’ll call this ‘aesthetic experience’. The difference is that the objective sense of “beautiful” refers to the property itself in the object that causes the experience, while the subjective sense of “beautiful” refers to the subjective experience alone. 

So my idea is this. A Leonardo painting, Chinese calligraphy, ballet, and a Michael Jordan move to the basket can all truly be called beautiful in the objective sense because of the properties they possess. But other things, like my friend’s mangy cat, may—although they are less grand—elicit an aesthetic experience for some people despite lacking the relevant properties of objectively beautiful things.

I won’t try to describe aesthetic experience. You all have had aesthetic experiences. But I will say something further about the objective sense of “beauty.” What property does it denote? Actually, I think this is a misleading question. There are several different properties that something can have to make it beautiful in the objective sense. I doubt I can give a whole list, so I won’t try. But some words will suggest what some of these properties are: simplicity (in an appropriate context), harmony (the matching of parts), and fluid motion. That these properties are distinct can be seen as follows: something can be harmonious without being simple (a Bach cantata); something can be simple in the relevant sense without having fluid motion (a simple painting); and something can have fluid motion without either simplicity or harmony (a turbulent rapids). And, again, the reason why these properties all get to be denoted with the same word, “beauty,” is that they all, when recognized, elicit a certain kind of experience. But objects can have these properties—and hence be objectively beautiful—even if no one is around to experience them.

Where—to connect this discussion to tomorrow’s show—might we hope to find the properties of beauty in sports? Answering this completely would take volumes. But I’d like to make one suggestion. I often noticed when watching Michael Jordan that his movements had something that was only rarely found in the movements of other players—and then only to a much lesser degree. They seemed to be the simplest movements possible for accomplishing the goal he set for himself. When other players were faced with having to drive on multiple defenders, they would juke, cross over, and spin in all sorts of fancy ways. Michael Jordan, however, would move his body and the ball in the simplest , most direct trajectory to allow him to get up for the dunk—spinning and juking only minimally and fluidly. That’s beautiful.

Thus I think that one of the properties that the objective sense of “beauty” refers to is that of solving a complex problem in the simplest way possible . This is a property that can be shared by dunks, musical harmonies, and mathematical proofs. It’s the property referred to when a theory is called “elegant” or a movement is called “natural.” It’s apparent in the shape of a dolphin’s body and its movements. Thus, this kind of beauty is both in works of human art and in nature . I would say that Michael Jordan’s moves belong to both categories.

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Comments (8).

Sunday, August 20, 2006 -- 5:00 PM

I'd say people just replace "Beauty" for "God," but, the real point missed is... ...if the satan character wasn't in the bible it would only be two pages, stoppin' with ".....god created Eve for Adam and they lived happily ever after. THE END."

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From the point of view of objectivity, to be an actual state of affairs,the existence of subjectivity must be objectively true, must be objectively the case-- Which, according to the current notion of objectivity, means it must be true even without any mind existing at all to think it is the case; a very peculiar result. And from the subjective point of view objectivity surely can't be true without the notion being in at least one mind-- how would it be possible to know it or even have it as an object of consideration if there was no notion of it? And there are no notions without minds (unless you want to posit disembodied thought) Objectivity must be subjective and subjectivity must be objective then from the respective points of view. If we can't get out of our minds to see whether something exists objectively independent of mind then how would we know? And if we can have objective notions then some notions are not subjectively confined to mind and are then independent of mind--- if so whence do they come? do we not then think with our minds? It certainly is possible to avoid positing any subjective point of view-- just eliminate the notion of "I" from the expression. Instead of "I am thinking" it is said "there is thinking" and instead of "I have changed my mind" there is "the mind has changed" or even this: instead of "I like pizza" one says "there is a liking for pizza" Even further: instead of "I have a bad feeling about this" one can say " it is claimed that there is a bad feeling had by an entity called an 'I' ". and finally, "I find this ugly"(or beautiful) can be said this way: "there is ugliness" (or beauty) or "there is a claim that there is an entity called an "I" which expriences beauty". It seems to me that objectification and subjectification are essentially points of view which amount to premises-- underlying presumptions that dictate which form of expression is appropriate, the subjective construction or the objective construction. And to take the next step, a statement like "it seems to me" or "in my opinion" can be seen as objective or subjective by applying the respective objective or objective points of view. Subjective because these are notions in a mind and objective because notions in a mind can be an objective fact (or these notions are outside of mind and so, what? neither subjective nor objective?) These above phrases or any other expressions are not in themselves subjective or objective but rather can be seen from an objective or subjective point of view. Objective and subjective are in part modes of expression. I think trying to indubitably decide for all what is the case or try to reach a universal consensus on the question whether there is a true and absolute disposition of the world apart from any points of view --- leads to a blind alley simply because the question of how much of the world is word or concept and how much is apart from word or concept ultimately will come down to one party saying they directly see that there is an object apart from the word and the other saying they directly see that there is no thing that is apart from the word-- word and object are abstracted from a somewhat. Where does the world start and the word or concept end? The statement "the world is separate from words"--- this split presumed between world and words-- what part of it is words and what part world? It will come down to personal preference where the line is drawn--- if there is a compulsion to draw the line in the first place. The bottom line: if there is no one point at which all opinion converges then these must remain points of view. And this goes for all distinctions including the line between beauty and ugliness. To speak more broadly about it the basics of our world are decided in good measure by premises, by fiat, not by conclusion. If it is said that the difference between a premise and a conclusion is that the premises lead to the conclusion necessarily or contingently or somesuch-- one can add that the dominant premise in this situation is the premise that the premises do lead to a conclusion. The ancient Mayans thought a distended skull shape was a beautiful thing and so pressed their infants skulls between boards to achieve this result. I don't share their taste. What is beautiful to one can subsequently under different conditions or under influence of a different frame of mind appear less so -- even ugly. It seems safe to say that there is no universal standard for beauty. Is there objective beauty? I would say there is, in the sense that what one finds beautiful, as with what one finds good tasting, simply seems to appear independent of desire (presuming an agent, an I and this i does something to produce the next thought--I find not trace of this doing something. That which is considered a result of the machinations of the I just arises which I can find no trace of machinations, just he next thought arising) ; as in " I wanted to find good- tasting your first attempt at an Austrian torte but alas I did not find it good-tasting". All there is is what arises as compellingly the case either as regards beauty and in the case of truth. The I doesno't decide what is compellingly the case-- it just arises as compellingly the case and is spoken or is not spoken. And what that is--as it arises to be said at this moment as being compellingly the case--- is that people will differ as to what is compellingly the case concerning beauty or ugliness or truth. The phrase " in my opinion" can be seen as just as objective or subjective as the phrase "this is the case" --when taken from either the objective or subjective point of view. They both involve notions in the mind and that may be seen as an objective fact. And they both are objectively the case as their objectivity is realized within a subjective mind. One can split the world into subjective and objective certainly-- but I really don't see why it would be useful to do so to discover what constitutes beauty. The statements "in my opinion, this is beautiful" and "this is objectively beautiful" can both be seen as subjective and objective for the reasons above and the issue of beauty is independent of the subjective or objective. I want to thankyou for this forum and this blog and for your radio program-- great and unique idea. I look forward to hearing you both on Sundays and I hope to call in sometime. Don't worry, I will keep my comments brief.

Friday, July 6, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

Mr. Van Leeuwen et. al., What beautiful postings up here: simplicity and clarity. What of the representation of the mangy cat? Could that be said to overlay a level of more 'objective' beauty on to the relatively, subjectively beautiful cat? You have not addressed the complex issue of representation at all here, have you? Is it Michael Jordan's move to the basket or the camera work that is beautiful, or both? -- Russell Erwin www.russellerwin.com

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

I am an artist (musician), as is my father, and this particular discussion is one we've been having for many years. My father, unlike me, believes in some form of objective beauty. His views reflect those of the author: that there are objects, works, and actions that possess certain qualities which make them INHERENTLY beautiful, whether we see them or not. This is an assertion I reject. In the first place, the examples of beauty posed above by the author seem to assume some sort of universal reaction which is in no way certain. The reaction to any given object as "beautiful" is dictated in large part by our cultural upbringing and our culturally formed paradigms. What do I mean by this? What I mean is that the appreciation of something as "beautiful" requires some minimal level of understanding first. This understanding is made possible by the values imparted to us by our culture (be it ethnic, economic, artistic, religious, etc). Without this level of cultural indoctrination, it is highly questionable whether one will consider any given object or act beautiful. Examples are legion in which a person hears music from a very different culture than their own, or sees art from a very different culture than their own, and does not deem it beautiful, or worse, deems it ugly or even offensive. Given this reality, the assertion that something can be beautiful independent of whether we recognize it as such or not sets up the possibility for a kind of aesthetic fascism. If individuals or cultures do not see the beauty in something that is "objectively beautiful" then it is very easy to argue that it is through some sort of fault or inferiority on their part. Those who are "in the know" and see the beauty presented them can pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for being smart enough, educated enough, and capable enough to see it while deeming those who don't as somehow faulty and/or inferior. This implication is unavoidable if one accepts the idea of beauty being objective. It leaves no room for discussion or disagreement between groups or individuals about what is beautiful. The assertion that there is universal agreement on things that are beautiful is demonstrably false. It is telling that the examples of "ojective" beauty given by the author are all things particular to the dominant culture -- Western European -- or, in the case of things originating from another culture (such as the Chinese calligraphy he refers to), things that have been accepted into and even adopted in some measure by the dominant culture. He mentions things that are known to him and understood by him. This reflects the author's cultural indoctrination. But what of things that are NOT understood by him at even the most minimal level? Presented with an object from a culture outside his own, an object which he understands little, he may in fact see it as beautiful. But it is perhaps equally likely he will see it as something grotesque or ugly, or even ignore it and discard it as trash. Conversely, he may see something from this foreign culture which it regards as useless and lacking in beauty, and in fact see some beauty in it himself. All of these assessments of beauty or the lack thereof are based on cultural indoctrination and the beauty paradigms which we absorb through that indoctrination. A discussion of beauty as "objective" taken to its logical conclusion, seems to make a certain level of arrogance unavoidable.

Sunday, October 14, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

Hi, everybody. I?m Melahuac Hernández from Mexico. First fo all,I want to congratulate you for this site. About the subject: I agree that there is an objective property of being beautiful. But I think too that that view needs more argumentation than Mr. D. S. Neil Van Leeuwen has already done. I think that Mr. Van Leeuwen is not pointing to the central philosophical issue in the discussion between objective vs. subjective views about beauty. Of curse there are the objective and the subjective meanings of 'beautiful' (and the related kind of judgements that we can do with that word). But in an important sense both meanings seems to be subjective. If I say: '2+2=4' I say something true, and that is true independently of any mind existing. But, if I say: 'The Mona Lisa is beautiful' is that really true independently of any mind? It seems that if the answer is 'Yes' then those who think that Mona Lisa?s paint is beautiful must be either absolutely right or absolutely wrong. If so, then suppose that 'Mona Lisa is beautiful' is true in this sense. Then, whoever lacks a positive aesthetic experience at the time he sees the Mona Lisa?s paint must have failed to see some of its properties. That is: it must be impossible the case that someone is aware of that paint properties but lack an adequate aesthetic experience. But, is it really incoherent that case? Is it incoherent that someone knows that some musical masterpiece is simple, harmonic, and has fluid motion, but lacks any positive aesthetic experience? The right answer seems to be 'No'. It seems that he could say truly and without any contradiction: "I see all this properties in that object but I have no special experience about it". What I think Mr. Van Leeuwen missed is the special connection that an objective property of beautifulness and the subjective experience must have. If there is any objective property of being beautiful then that property must have an intrinsic and a necessary connection with an appropriate subjective experience. But, which property that we can find in any object has that kind of connection? Which property could have that kind of connection? It seems that we can always think in a subject being aware of all the properties of an object but lacking any aesthetic experience. It seems a matter of fact that we DO have these experiences when we are aware of an object having those properties. But this seems to be relative to our minds being constituted as they are in fact. Perhaps we are so psychologically constituted that we have this kind of experiences, but there are other (possible) mind constitutions that lack them. Then, the apparent objective fact we see depends of an accidental feature of our mind. If so, is relative to our mind being the way it is that we find beauty in things. Therefore: there is no objective property of beautifulness. I lack an answer to this objection so my belief in objective aesthetical properties is unfounded, so I see much more strength in the subjective view. But, what do you think??

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 -- 5:00 PM

Thought you'd be interested to know that recent "spiritual" (or "practical metaphysics") research seems to be showing that aesthetics is different to beauty/ugliness. Aesthetics is using the formulas of a universe without using the suggested Game. Beauty/Ugliness is aesthetics PLUS Game considerations. So beauty is objective if one goes into enough detail specifying the exact Game it refers to (and relevant aberrations on that game, of course). My recent blog post on the subject gives some clear examples, and comments on aesthetics vs. emotions . . . http://www.wildlife-art-guide.com/blog/aesthetics-vs-emotions-fine-art-v ...

Thursday, June 6, 2024 -- 8:13 PM

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Thursday, June 27, 2024 -- 12:07 AM

Interesting post! Beauty can indeed be both subjective and objective. The examples of personal preferences and inherent qualities highlight this duality well. Looking forward to the discussion on athletic beauty! Specialty Rooms - Wine Cellars, Craft Rooms, Man Caves, Home Gyms

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Brainiac Beauty: Philosophers and Beauty—What Some Philosophers Have to Say About Beauty That Is Relevant to Empirical Aesthetics (Or Possibly Just Interesting)

• First Online: 23 November 2019

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• Rhett Diessner 2  

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The first great philosophical work on Beauty, in the Western Canon, is Plato’s Symposium wherein he charts the stages of loving beauty: stage one, we fall in love with one particular beautiful body; stage two we love all beautiful bodies; stage three, the human soul ( psyche ) is more beautiful than the human body; stage four, a love of social order; stage five, loving knowledge and wisdom; and final stage six, loving the divine Beauty itself. Aristotle defines all of the human virtues as being beautiful, and that the telos (the purpose) of the virtues is to manifest moral beauty . Kant and Schopenhauer emphasized disinterest , having no goal concerning the object of beauty other than to appreciate it. Iris Murdoch focused on the ability for natural and artistic beauty to help us unself and become better human beings. Unity-in-diversity is shown as the most common definition for beauty by philosophers. Beauty experiences have both subjective and objective aspects. The feeling of beauty happens inside us, but there is something real about the beauty stimulus. It is the dialectic, the relationship , between the inner and the outer that creates an experience of beauty.

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Kant can be notoriously difficult to understand. I have read several of his works; and then read explanations of his theories, and I still only partially “get it.” If you are interested in Kant and are thinking about performing empirical aesthetics, I recommend reading this first: Hayn-Leichsenring, G. U., & Chatterjee, A. ( 2019 ). Colliding Terminological Systems—Immanuel Kant and Contemporary Empirical Aesthetics. Empirical Studies of the Arts . https://doi.org/10.1177/0276237418818635

Note, as described in the next chapter on Evolution and Beauty, that story-telling may actually be the one instinct for art that humans have. It’s the best candidate for a naturally selected adaptive trait. All other art may be a by-product of evolution.

If you are an ontological materialist, and the concept “soul” seems superstitious to you, that’s alright, after all, this is a myth I am describing.

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Psyche and Eros Interlude One

The most beautiful story/myth in the world.

One of the most beautiful stories I have ever encountered is the ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros. Experiencing the myth as a story can arouse many of the major aesthetic emotions, including a variety of prototypical, pleasant, cognitive, and negative aesthetic emotions, and has the tension and resolution of a classic dramatic work (cf. Menninghaus et al., 2019 ; Schindler et al., 2017 ).

It’s a beautiful narrative story Footnote 2 about beauty: about loss, love, loss, and gain. The word “psyche” (ψυχη) is importantly homonymous. In Greek it means “soul” or “spirit” (cf. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary , 1961/1976, p. 1832), but also “butterfly.” These two metaphors dominate this myth: (a) Psyche, as the most beautiful being in Greece (the world), is a metaphor for the soul; and (b) Psyche, as butterfly, is the metaphor of transformation, as we make our way from being a little worm in a womb into an immortal being soaring on divine wings to our eternal abode. Footnote 3

The Psyche Myth, as described here, is based on Apuleius’ classic text, The Metamorphoses , also known as the Golden Ass , a book of 11 chapters, written in Latin in the second century CE. In that text, a person named Lucius is metamorphosed into a donkey, and experiences a series of adventures. The oldest extant copy of the myth is from the eleventh century CE, written in Latin and is housed in Florence, Italy (Kenney, 1990 ).

Although “Psyche” is a Greek word, it is retained throughout Apuleius’ original Latin text. The name of Eros, the god of love, is written by Apuleius in its Latin form, “Cupido.” Nonetheless, as this is a Greek myth, I will refer to him as Eros. It is worth noting that in paintings and sculptures of Eros/Cupid, from the time of ancient Greece and Rome, through the present day, he is shown as either a beautiful, virile young man, or as a weak, pudgy, child. In the Psyche and Eros Myth he is most definitely depicted as a young man who has the beautiful body of a Greek god (well … he is a Greek god). The great existential psychologist Rollo May (cf. 1969 , Ch. 3, “Eros in Conflict with Sex”) makes a case that the young man Eros represents a psychologically healthy approach to sex and love, whereas the weak, pudgy baby represents a cultural deterioration of love into something banal, childish, and insipid. This problem arises when a culture does not differentiate between two kinds of erotic love: one physically passionate but empty, and the other spiritually ardent and rich.

I will include a story-telling portion of the Psyche and Eros Myth between each chapter of this book, and then will explain how I use the Myth in my PSYC 101 Introduction to Psychology class in Chap. 8 : Aesthetics and Pedagogy.

Dramatis Personae of the Psyche and Eros Myth:

Aphrodite/Venus: She is the mother of Eros (Fig. 2.1 ).

Psyche: the most beautiful being in the world (Psyche means Soul in Greek; Fig. 2.2 ).

Eros: the god of Love (AKA Cupid or Amour).

“The Birth of Venus,” Sandro Botticelli 1483–5, Uffizi Gallery. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Botticelli_Venus.jpg

Psyche on the Rock by Max Klinger. (Photo credit Rhett Diessner)

Check out this sculpture by Antonio Canova (greatest Romantic Period sculptor) of Eros (and Psyche); it is on display in the Louvre, Paris: http://musee.louvre.fr/oal/psyche/psyche_acc_en.html .

The first time I went to the Louvre, my main goal was spend time with that sculpture. It was glorious.

Our story begins …

Beauty as the Royal Daughter

A king and queen, somewhere in ancient Greece, had three daughters. Two of the daughters were quite attractive, but “The loveliness of the youngest, however, was so perfect that human speech was too poor to describe or even praise it satisfactorily … [all] were struck dumb with admiration of her unequalled beauty (Kenney, 1990 , IV.28.2–3).” This youngest daughter was named Psyche.

Venus Is Jealous and Then Envious of Psyche

The fame of Psyche’s beauty spread, and soon everyone left Venus’ (Aphrodite’s) temples empty, and even began to offer their prayers to Psyche (Kenney, 1990 , IV.28–IV.29.4). This caused jealousy and great anger in Venus and she decided to punish Psyche, thus revealing her envy of Psyche’s adoration by the populace. By way of punishment she asked Eros, her son, to cause Psyche to fall in love with the most degraded and wretched man on earth.

Will Eros obey her?

To be continued … (You will find the next installment of the story at the end of Chap. 3 ).

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Diessner, R. (2019). Brainiac Beauty: Philosophers and Beauty—What Some Philosophers Have to Say About Beauty That Is Relevant to Empirical Aesthetics (Or Possibly Just Interesting). In: Understanding the Beauty Appreciation Trait. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32333-2_2

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What is beauty?

Whilst in philosophy in particular, and academic discourse in general, it is advisable to avoid sweeping statements, I believe it is fair to say that the issue of defining beauty is one that has occupied the mind, not just of scholars, but of many people over several millennia. For example, for Plato, an ideal from of beauty is not found in the natural world: in individual things such as objets d’art, people, animals and so on, but in the Realm of Ideal Forms which it shares with other forms such as Justice. Plato acknowledged that everything that belongs in the material world is made of substances that time will eventually erode. However, he also held that everything is made after a timeless mould that is eternal and immutable; that is, everything in the physical world is but an inferior copy of an ideal form which exists in, which for him, is the ‘real’ world.

However, rather than continuing with a detailed and long-winded history of the issue of the question of beauty over the centuries, let me give you my own understanding of this concept as I have come to see it.

In Philosophy the rubric under which the issue of beauty is discussed is aesthetics. The term aesthetics derives from the Greek word aisthanomai , which means to perceive, to feel and it is in this ancient term that we find the essence of the meaning of that which we know as ‘beauty’. That is, it is the appreciation by the mind of the quality we recognize as beautiful in phenomena (i.e. things in the world outside the mind) transmitted to the mind through the senses. The question, of course, that arises from this description is: ‘what is it in the mind that allows it to make this judgment call?’

In the issue of the relationship between mind and phenomena, from Kant we learn that ‘although all knowledge begins in experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of it’. What Kant argues is that before we experience things in themselves (phenomena), there already exists, within the mind, a certain a priori framework that allows us to give meaning to that which we experience through the senses. For Kant, this framework is made up of the intuitions space and time and the law of cause and effect. Now, it seems to me that in the much the same way that Kant makes the case for space and time, and the law of causality privileging the mind to put order on that which the mind experiences, so too can a case be made that there also exists within the mind (let us call it) a property that privileges it to make a judgment call on that which it experiences or perceives as beauty. That property is what I call the instinct of equilibrity.

It seems to me that it is this instinct, this sense of balance or proportionality, that was in Keats’ mind when he said that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty! – that is all/Ye know and all ye need to know’. That is, at its most refined, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.

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The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty?

November 15, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 34 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:00:16 — 110.2MB)

Kant thinks that finding something beautiful is different than merely liking it. It’s a certain kind of liking, not dependent on your idiosyncratic tastes (like your preference for one color or flavor or tone over another) or on your moral opinions. He wants these judgments to be subjective in the sense that they’re not about the object, but about the fact that people receive pleasure from it, yet he also wants them to be universal, so that if I (correctly) find something beautiful, then I expect others to feel the same way, and moreover, if they have taste, they should.

Of course this is all put into very difficult Kantian language with virtually no actual examples, so the regular foursome had a good time attempting to translate it to something you can get your head around. Read more about the topic and get the book .

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Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation .

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November 15, 2014 at 3:12 pm

In the study of literature it’s common to find a work to be beautiful, but not pleasing. Not pleasing because what the author has to say or the theme of the work do not interest you.

There’s lots of poetry which I find beautiful, but I’m not interested in poetry. There are writers like Proust or Joyce, whose works are beautiful in aesthetic terms, but they don’t please me because, as I said above, I’m not interested in what they write about.

November 15, 2014 at 6:04 pm

As Kant tries to hang more concepts on his transcendental deduction architecture developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, the architecture shows fault lines which began in the original architecture. These fault lines are refelected in the confusion the PEL four find themeselves in while providing an excellent reflection of Kant’s precarious and perplexing view of beauty. Kant wants aesthetic subjectivity (interest/desire/pleasure) to have a grounding that is universal and certain (disinterested), so he uses a modified/confused/confusing concept of the transcendental. He admits of pleasure being a correlate of beauty, though not necessarily for all people, because people have their own idiosyncratic interests. That pleasure is generated by the imagination, a faculty which synthesizes individaul experiences in order to be represented to the understanding (cognition). Kant attempts to ground his drive for secure, universal beauty in a combination of common sense (sensation that is common to man) and in the peculiar “freeplay.” He invokes freeplay as a kind of release of the clutch that disengages momentarily the rational architecture and engine of understanding (cognition) from the experiential synthesis of the imagination. These maneuvers reflect the limits of his transcendental deduction efforts, and are reflected in the un-natural concepts of “disinterested” beauty (as well as the “disinterested” morality of the categorical imperative). Kant reflects the rationalistic version of a brain in a vat by failing to adequately integrate his excellent observations of the function of the imagination and its syntheses, in order to present the full human condition.

November 15, 2014 at 6:32 pm

Is it form that gives the sense of universality to Beauty, or is it the uniqueness of matter that gives Beauty the sense of universality? The upcoming podcast on the Sublime should shed further light on this fault line in Kant’s transcendental architecture.

November 16, 2014 at 8:04 am

if you guys did not get the message from Pirsig, rationalizing art is one of the few real oxymorons. beauty is affect thru and thru.

now, should any PELers want to study a serious philosopher’s treatment of the sublime, dump the Cartesian-Kantian adherents to the 13th century monk, Tommie, who morphed Aristotle’s anthropocentric take on reason as being the sole explanation for why I can live forever, but not my dog (who, as it turns out, also reasons – not surprising when you understand consciousness as the affect of experienced attention to a what-if-that-is-not-that proposition). go to whitehead’s treatment of contrast to see why those art loving humanities folk across campus are discovering Alfie.

btw, it is the same experienced affect of an affirmation/negation proposition thatt informs my dog to approach or flee that Thomists like Deacartes and Kant believe to be a solely human capacity necessary to gain eternal heavenly abode – the discernment that the beautific vision of god is the best thing ever. even better than a belly rub!

November 16, 2014 at 3:55 pm

thanks fellas PEL at its and yer best, taking the work apart making sense of the pieces and than trying to put it all back in working order, reading as reverse-engineering plus a bit of critique to top it off; free-play/teloi/making-sense-of-creation I can see the outlines of the Whitehead show filling in….

November 17, 2014 at 1:58 am

Great episode, these were the kind of discussion that got me into PEL.

November 17, 2014 at 6:39 am

a copy/paste of ‘whitehead’s treatment of contrast’ yielded this gem: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2232 …a good article from Shaviro also comes up.

Cobb is probably the most knowledgeable scholar of ANW today. this is fine reading for all, especially those who want to ‘feel’ what Alfie tried to express in writing (and failed at so miserably). serious readers of Pirsig will take pause when reading this take on Values, and will likely find themselves scratching their heads while muttering ‘what did Pirsig say that is not lifted directly from ANW’s work?’

i hope that dmf is right about an upcoming ANW episode of PEL. i further hope that the hosts will not resort to insecure ridicule when tackling the work of a profound thinker that was completely hidden from them in their schooling. a thoughtful treatment of Whitehead and his works by this PEL site could seriously usher-in a new found, post process theism, interest ln my boy, Alfie.

November 17, 2014 at 9:54 am

Cobb is a terribly weak reader/user of Whitehead and more interested in christian apologetics, Shaviro is a more serious reader (folks should read his related book on his website) and owes much to the profound philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers who isn’t pushing theology (or any other dancing wu-li master style pablum) and definitely worth a read or two if one has the time, if not this is an excellent recorded lecture along the same lines: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2013/10/melanie-sehgal-whiteheads-metaphysics-as-situated-metaphysics/

November 17, 2014 at 3:39 pm

Cobb is not as crisp and clear as Griffin, but i think he does a decent job w/ ANW ideas. i usually enjoy reading the arts folk who write about ANW. comparing how artists and process theologians read him is kinda like multiply-interpretably poetry vs scholastic dogmatism. either group has a moving target, but the artists’ take on Alfie wins the most interesting/creative/adventurous prize

November 17, 2014 at 9:50 pm

I liked Wes’s interpretation of this piece. I was trying to explain Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement to myself, using Wes’s apparatus, and ran into a problem or two when I analyzed it, and would appreciate any comments or clarifications.

First let’s start with Kant’s notion non-aesthetic conceptual judgments. It is helpful for me to think of concepts as sets–even though concepts have more machinery than naive sets. Suppose there are two sets called LETTER and NUMBER, where LETTER={A,B,C,D,E} and NUMBER={1,2,3,4,5}. Now suppose you are wandering around, and in your perceptions, you notice the element D in the wild. You make a judgment when you decide that D belongs to the set LETTER. The act of ‘placing’ or ‘identifying’ an element within a set is analogous to making a judgment. In Kant’s language, this is placing the particular under the universal of the concept. LETTER and NUMBER are analogous to concepts.

Wes says that aesthetics judgments, for Kant, are about ‘revving’ up the cognitive faculties, stimulating them to begin to make judgments as above, but the cognitive faculties never complete the judgment because there is ‘surplus’ of content in the object (element) that cannot be placed within a concept (or set). For example, given the two sets above, if you find a G in the wild, and attempt to determine what set this belongs to, your cognitive faculties won’t be able to complete the judgment because no set contains a G. You will be able to perceive the G, in terms of its lines and shapes and size, but there is something about it (a surplus) that goes beyond your current concepts.

The representation of the G cannot be placed under a concept by the understanding, and Wes says that the ‘idling’ or ‘buzzing’ of this play between the representation and incompleted(my word) understanding generates pleasure. My problem with this reasoning, with respect to aesthetics, is that anything that we conceive of a ‘new’ seems to invoke this same sort of idling. If we lack a concept for the determination of an object—because that object is newly witnessed—then we ought to, by this reasoning, say that pleasure necessarily arises. But all that is new is not pleasurable or beautiful. Some new things are boring, revolting, terrifying, or simply indescribable but not pleasurable. The ‘buzzing’ of new things can lead to many different sorts of appreciation, and nothing isolates the beautiful other than an empirical experience of pleasure—a la Hume.

Another problem: Wes describes the ‘surplus’ of form in the object to give rise to the beautiful, but this surplus, once experienced as beautiful, should also begin to form its own new concept–even if we cannot name it–a concept which could be used by the understanding at a later time to categorize similar objects. These objects, which will be similar to the original beautiful object, would then not give rise to pleasure because they could be judged in a conceptual way. In some sense, this seems right, as the once beautiful can become a common thing.

I personally find circles beautiful, in a disinterested way. Is there form, in the circle, beyond my concept of the circle? The concept of the circle and its form seem to exhaust one another.

November 19, 2014 at 3:17 pm

I think composing a set and then placing the G outside of the set as the “surplus form” isn’t quite correct. The surplus content that is responded to a Beauty has no relation to the concept, and therefore no relation to the set, so G being part of the set or not is of no consequence for understanding it as Beautiful. My take on it is that it may be that G is admitted as part of the set but what Kant calls Beauty would be what has no necessary relation to the G as a G. Rather, it is the way we feel when interacting with that surplus content that is Beauty.

The idling or the buzzing, in my mind, regards the resistance placed on the mind based on the surplus content. Though resistance seems like the wrong idea. More like, the mind engages with the pause? A new object doesn’t cause idling or buzzing so much as a frantic search for the conceptual grounding needed to understand the object. This idea, though, would run counter to the examples given in the podcast about working through a mathematical proof.

Section 17, and the discussion of the Ideal of Beauty, hints at answers to your comment about surplus content being conceptualized. The surplus content, always interacted with through free play, by definition, prevents it from becoming a concept. I think Kant sort of avoids the question by saying “look, the whole system forecloses on the Ideal of Beauty (I guess the first remarks about vague beauty may sum up why), except in the case of man,” and then begins the whole normal Idea and the perfection of humanity which seems like some wild argument about how man alone can be an Ideal Beauty because he can align his purpose with perfection(then, is the Kingdom of Ends and the perfection of humanity through alignment by the categorical imperative an aesthical judgement, a judgement of Beauty, a judgement of the surplus content of man acknowledged as his perfectibility?).

Like you, I found this to be great fun to work with. It even makes me want to try on more Kant as my only other information came from the old PEL podcast on ethics. I’m looking forward to the myriad, or surplus, ways in which I am totally off-base here!

November 20, 2014 at 12:20 am

Joshua, I think you’re right about how placing G outside the set isn’t quite right. Here’s another way to put it. Let us suppose we have the concept of an apple=A. Now any particular apple can be ‘reduced’ to the concept of an apple, a sort of Platonic form of an apple, plus some additional features. An apple may also have accidental properties p—it size, a dirt stain, a worm hole, etc—that are not necessary to the apple. We may also take that apple to be beautiful, according to Kant, such that it has surplus form which I will label #. So, our particular apple, call it a1, is a1=(A + p + #), where A is a necessary form/content of an apple, p are some accidental properties that can be conceptualized, and # is surplus content that cannot be conceptualized.

It appears that the key characteristic feature of # is that it cannot be conceptualized—is Kant saying that form that cannot be conceptualized always gives rise to the beautiful? Can’t there be non-conceptual form # that is not beautiful? And why would we say that a1, the particular apple, is beautiful? The aspects of the apple that allow us to call it an apple have nothing to do with it being beautiful, according to Kant, because these can be conceptualized. We would have to say that beauty ‘accompanies’ that apple, but the (conceptual) apple itself is not beautiful.

Appreciate your insights.

November 21, 2014 at 2:03 am

Marc, As you stated, no set contains a G: “the cognitive faculties never complete the judgment because there is ‘surplus’ of content in the object (element) that cannot be placed within a concept (or set).”

I don’t think Wes is claiming that all that is beautiful is necessairily pleasurable and beautiful, but that what is beautiful pleasurable, not necessarily new, but not placed under a concept of the understanding, “buzzing.”

I don’t think that Kant is saying that “form that cannot be conceptualized always gives rise to the beautiful,” but sometimes, when form and individual receptivity prevails, the true surplus is experienced as beauty.

(P.S. The concept of surplus is foundational for a poststructural metaphysics.)

November 17, 2014 at 9:59 pm

Thank you guys for this awesome podcast. This is the first of yours that I have heard, but the first of many. I only started this podcast because I have a bachelors in philosophy and history-with a lot of papers written on Hans Georg Gadamer-and I finished it because I came to Madison/Middleton three years ago after college. Keep up the awesome work. I will be listening. Thanks for inspiring a philosophy guy who gave up to keep on reading.

November 17, 2014 at 11:39 pm

Just finished Octavio Paz “Labyrinth of Solitude”, you interested?

November 19, 2014 at 6:23 am

Objet petit a (surplus object), anyone? Sounds like it: “[H]e [Lacan] relates the objet a to what Kant called “der Gegenstand ohne Begriff,” the object without concept (not covered by any concept). The objet a is as such “irrational,” in the strictly literal sense of being outside all ratio, all relation as proportion. In other words, when a particular element resists being subsumed under a universal concept, the objet a, “what is in you more than yourself,” is precisely that je ne sais quoi which prevents this subsumption.” — Less Than Nothing, “The Objet A Between Form and Content”, 11th paragraph

November 20, 2014 at 5:36 pm

I enjoyed this episode, thanks. It was good to hear the core 4 presenters in conversation again.

After listening, I was left confused though as to whether things that weren’t directly sensed were excluded from conceiving beauty in this way, for example a poem about a flower might not be beautiful, but a flower could. I was wondering this about the same time the podcast raised that Kan’t thinking privileged sense, the visual in particular.

This was what I was hoping to get more of an understanding of. I’m a high school English teacher and I have a Noongar (Western Australian Aboriginal nation) creation story that I teach my students which I (with deliberate provocation) present as being beautiful. But I’ve been challenged by friends that I can’t say this because beauty is relative (which begs another – though more English and less philosophical – question, why saying this about, say, a Keats poem would be less problematic). So I really liked Kant’s move to subjective universality as a way of differentiating between interested and disinterested notions of beauty.

But it doesn’t feel right to apply it to writings about natural phenomena in the same way you would towards natural phenomena themselves, or images of natural phenomena (eg. painting, photographs etc.). Reading seems to engage in more cognitive work to be in agreeable (or pleasant, or whatever) in a disinterested way. Yet writing can also have harmony etc. that we could find beautiful, but this is the writing (the form) that we’d be finding beautiful though, right? Not the subject matter or content?

Similarly, I have this idea that power-generating wing-turbines “look” kind of beautiful. I lived in a coastal town in the south of Australia with what are seriously the most beautiful beaches in the world (in the vernacular AND Kantian senses of beautiful). There were wind farms on the coast. No problems. They didn’t seem out of place. In fact they kind of harmonised with it and added to its beauty. I’m guessing that because they rely on natural forces, the way many things in nature have evolved to do, they have some of the subjectively universal characteristics that make things beautiful.

And yet, in Australia there has developed a massive opposition to them (I don’t know if this is the same in the US?). Our government has just launched another inquiry into them, changing the terms of reference again in the hope some major problem can be found in them. Our federal treasurer has said that he “can’t think of anything more offensive than wind turbines.” In line with this, our Prime Minister has said “coal is good for humanity.”

I guess this isn’t a view that would see coal as beautiful. But what our socially and neo-coservative government down under *would* see as beautiful, I think, is an economic system that creates growth. To them, this has the sort of harmony that appeals to their minds, which are active in trying to bring order to things in the way they are. And wind turbines call that paradigm into question so they see them as ugly. But again, this isn’t an encounter with natural phenomena but with an idea (like a writing) about the natural phenomena.

It seems when I start thinking about the difference between “real” primary experience and secondary experience (my terms)(, I encounter this problem. Plus, I’m not really comfortable with this distinction between primary and secondary experience anyway as I kind of come from a post-structural background where everything is text – there is not essential primary/secondary distinctions.

November 22, 2014 at 10:19 am

Hi Heath, on one way of looking at Kant, anything that has a surplus content that goes beyond the conceptual may (although not always) give rise to beauty. The conceptual aspect of a poem, the part we make clear conceptual judgments about, are the words of the poem. However, the feelings and meanings that arise from a poem go beyond the words as objects and arise from the specific relationships between words. These relationships, and our appreciation of them, do not follow from conceptual judgments at all. We could never form a concept for every type of relationship between sets of words. So I would say that Kant would have no problem with attributing beauty to a poem or a song.

As for people who say that beauty is all relative, ask these people to point to the specific arguments for that belief (they will undoubtedly say that Jake thinks THAT is beautiful but Jane thinks it sucks, so therefor, everything is relative…And you can say, the fact that two people disagree, or multiple people disagree about something, does not imply that an objective answer does not exist. Some people say the earth is flat, others round, therefor its all relative? Then your friends will say, well, beauty is different, is all in the mind. Then you can talk about Plato and Kant who see things otherwise.

Not sure how I feel about wind turbines. I saw huge fields of these when driving through Texas. Gave me a sense of awe more than beauty or disgust.

November 24, 2014 at 12:17 am

I loved the podcast and have a few thoughts after reading the comments.

The notion of a sensible surplus driving beauty is not accurate. The confusion comes, I think, when Kant insists that we do not have a concept for beauty. This seems to indicate that there is too much for our concepts to grasp. But it is not a matter of too much content, or even too much activity. It is that there is no rule for saying that a given presentation will produce this disinterested pleasure. You cannot say if a presentation has these properties, it will produce the feeling of beauty in us. Now this is an assertion by Kant, not an argument. Proving a negative and all that. But he tries to show that we can have universally valid judgments of beauty without any such rule in hand.

A better way to get Kant’s view is to say that *we* must take an aesthetic attitude to things in order for beauty to show up. That is, a sensible presentation can only be grasped as beautiful if we suspend all practical interest in it–or if in addition to our practical interest we pay attention to how it looks, sounds, feels directly. Once we choose to look at (or attend to) something in this way, we can also attend to the way it affects us and thus become aware of the nature of this engagement. Think of the time you look at a painting and move back and forth between its look and your own reactions. This is an intense, dynamic, open-ended process that is neither wholly “in” the painting’s qualities nor “in” yourself. It is an engagement between the painting’s sensible elements and your own efforts at looking, sensing, feeling, thinking, etc. You say the painting is beautiful, but what you are really assessing is the character of this engagement. I think this is what Kant means by indeterminate (it cannot be anticipated by a concept, a set of rules) and reflective (it assesses the object in terms of our engagement with it).

So if it is not a surplus, what does drive beauty? Is there anything about the object (presentation) that makes it beautiful? Strictly speaking, no. Having such a definition would constitute a rule, a concept of beauty. The closest Kant will get to a definition or answer is form, specifically dynamic form. Beauty cannot be stilted and boring; it is always in some sense dynamic. On the other hand, it cannot be excessively active. I don’t think Kant can prove this; it is a matter of examining your own experience with beauty. But if you go with him on this, you can say with him that it is the form of the engagement between the sensible presentation and our minds/bodies (he says our powers of presentation, i.e. imagination and understanding) that gives rise to beauty. Our very experience of the painting takes a certain form–a dynamic back and forth–which we reflect on and enjoy as beautiful. Form is key because it transcends mere agreeable content (I like green stuff!) and approaches something like a concept, with its abstract structure. It gives us the form of conceptuality without the…conceptuality of form.

I think the question of poetry is great. Kant does not really address it, but I think he would have to tie it to imagination and argue that poetry taken aesthetically (again, you can treat it conceptually as well) conjures up specific sensible images and sounds for us to engage. Thus there is a kind of painting in poetry as well as a musicality, and you could treat poetry as an analogue to these arts. But the emotional beauty of much poetry would be very hard for Kant to handle. He doesn’t have a f’n clue what an emotion is. Everything for him stops at the mind, and beauty is, if not rational, entirely “heady.” I think one of his greatest followers is Merleau-Ponty, who brought much of this talk about judgment down into the body and into the dynamic movement, feeling, and sense of life itself.

November 24, 2014 at 12:14 pm

What is beauty? Almost never the prose and literary stylings of philosophers

November 26, 2014 at 11:25 am

It seems like Kant’s insistence that judgment precede pleasure or follow pleasure is a false dichotomy. Can they not be contemporaneous? This would actually position aesthetics uniquely as opposed to moral or conceptual judgments which soon render pleasure (especially judgments of the good).

November 26, 2014 at 5:37 pm

Temporal synchronicity makes sense but leaves the logical ordering of the two unclear. Either the judgment is a judgment about the pleasure, or (less plausibly) we feel pleasure in light of the judgment, or they’re somehow one and the same thing (which makes no sense prima facie, but one could maybe deny that the pleasure here is purely a feeling, that all legitimate human emotions involve cognitive components, such as my feeling guilty or indignant involves a host of cognitive commitments and isn’t just a feeling), or they’re concurrent yet logically distinct, which sounds like really, there’s just the pleasure, and the judgment is an epiphenomenon that we attribute to the experience post facto (which after habit sets in becomes a matter of interpreting our feelings through this lens of judgment) because we feel the pretentious need to justify our feeling.

November 28, 2014 at 8:54 pm

I think the two sentiments probably co-evolve within the physical brain, such that the brain chemicals/neurons that perform aesthetic judgments and those which derive pleasure from aesthetics overlap and/or feedback between each other.

I also think the two can be independent but meaningfully related – such as if both are triggered by a prior mental structure, such as some part of the visual cortex.

Obviously you can resolve some of the sequencing questions with sufficiently advanced neurology.

I also think the possibility that there’s something conceptual (or simply influenced by conceptual-level processes) about aesthetics should be considered seriously. I have a lot more respect (including beauty-finding) for Django Reinhardt’s music or the Seagram Building in NY as a result of my knowledge about them. I have gained the barest amount of respect (and beauty-finding) for Jackson Pollack as a result of learning more about him. Either I am very confused about beauty or Kant is.

December 4, 2014 at 3:14 am

It’s been about sixteen years since I’ve read this piece, but it seems to me that Kant is doing a lot of mental gymnastics to get around the subjective notion of informed refinement as it informs valuation of an object, and how that’s unavoidable. Basically, I think there’s some seriously essentialist notion of subjective “purity” at work here that Kant is attempting to shoehorn into the objective, thus making it universal to a certain extent. Which, really, comes off as a way of making apologetics for snobbery, while never really addressing the idea of subjective refinement of taste; that is, he’s attempting to equate subjective cultural refinement with nature. And though I understand that you guys make great efforts at making the most charitable interpretations of a given text as possible, I’d love to see a segment similar to Read It and Weep’s “King of Bullshit Mountain” segment when you encounter cognitive dissonance within a text. Maybe that wouldn’t be fair to the historicity of an 18th century text, but it would make for great entertainment.

So, I guess the question that I’d have from that would be, do you suppose that Kant is performing some bullshit mental gymnastics — id est, willful cognitive dissonance — to excuse elitist snobbery here?

December 11, 2014 at 11:05 am

I see Kant addressing a very real aspect of experience–the way things can appear beautiful to us, and the ways in which this is both subjective or private and shared, public. Exhibiting a painting in a museum, or pointing to a view of nature for someone else to look at, both of these mean “I see something interesting that I think you will find interesting too.” Where does the interest lie, and why do we expect others to share it? The interest is not practical, e.g., “I think you will benefit from this.” And yet there is in the experience something interesting, fascinating, attractive. It is a playful, open-ended experience that seems to have no direct, conceptual basis and yet engages our concepts and thinking in a dynamic way. (Is there some conceptual basis for the beauty of a melody, a rule for beautiful music? Kant thinks not.) And when this playful engagement pleases us, we expect others to experience the same kind of engagement and pleasure–or else why point to a landscape or to a painting for others to see? Why play music for others to hear? I think these are the phenomenological aspects of experience that Kant is trying to make sense of. One might dispute this account of experience, but if not, then we can recognize that Kant is at least not making shit up just to finish his theory. He is trying to answer real questions emerging out of real, shared experiences. As for the way his answers relate to the rest of his philosophy, that’s a much bigger conversation.

October 9, 2015 at 5:06 am

You lads might appreciate this documentary by Roger Scruton on Why Beauty Matters https://vimeo.com/112655231

What struck me listening to your show is that it sounds like Kant is trying to make what is beautiful ‘correct’ such that if we all thought correctly we would probably find the same things beautiful. Maybe I misunderstood. But that is obviously problematic even if you did share identical sympathies in many regards as it depends on what time you lived in, what certain images/sounds were linked to in your life etc. A 13th century monk is not going to find much to admire in an Australian aborigine’s dot paintings I suspect.

Scruton is a classic case of a very conservative but humble philosopher raising something I think is often overlooked as to the purpose or at least a purpose of beauty and why a lot of what passes for art today is arguably harmful for our flourishing.

November 5, 2015 at 8:44 am

One thing that struck me listening to your excellent discussion of this was how the ideas in Kant’s Critique of Judgment might lie right on top of how Kierkegaard’s work is often described. Here is my understanding of what one might find in a “Kierkegaard for Dummies” summary regarding the three lives a person lives, moving from one kind of life to another through a “leap of faith.”

1. The aesthetic life consists of immediacy–the present, language-defying (except perhaps very imperfectly via poetry and other expressive art), beauty, intensely subjective, intuitive. You love yourself, you expect good immediately, and you strive with yourself and your perceptions.

2. The ethical life consists of the intersubjective–logical, language-based, sacrifice of self to the society, “rise above the self.” You love reason and universality (intersubjectively defined), you expect good sometime in the future (delayed gratification, if at all), and you strive with the world and the people in it.

3. The religious life, or the life of faith, is completely different. The individual rises above the (intersubjective) universal which places the “single individual in absolute relation to the absolute,” and this creates the paradox of faith. You love God, you expect the impossible, and you strive with God.

These descriptions seemed, to me, to line up quite nicely with the aesthetic, the beautiful, and the good as Kant delineated them. The middle suggests, perhaps, a way to approach the apparently paradoxical notion of a universal subjectivity — recast it as an ethical formulation, and expand the notion of “self” outward to encompass the community. A good example of this is the scientific community: the use of language and negotiated standards/metrics/peer-review-processes/etc. to develop a set of universals that can exist and be honored without the more-narrowly-defined self needing to derive aesthetic pleasure from them (though of course they could also do that as well). Criticism of those who “lack taste” can be re-cast ethically as anti-social behavior.

Good stuff. Still catching up!

April 26, 2017 at 12:45 pm

I wish I weren’t late to this party! Good episode!

Why is the idea of purposiveness framed as – it seems like it’s meant for us to see it’s beauty or however you say that. It reminds me of the kind of “mindedness” the world has that you guys talked about with…..Sartre? It’s the idea that because we can take in certain things that there must be some quality that makes it like us. Why not the other way around? Why not say that we are designed in order to appreciate what is? Or that what we appreciate is a result of what something that is done by a like mind…or something like that? I’m sure this is a totally ridiculous question but – it seems like if you think that there is this mysterious purposiveness then it’s kind of self centered in a way. Like what I see and experience and think beautiful is all there is. I don’t know….I just don’t really understand that idea and why it’s so prevalent in philosophy.

[…] mentions Immanuel Kant by name but his presence looms large over the chapter on aesthetics. As you may remember from the Kant episode, disinterestedness toward art would involve approaching a work of art without ulterior […]

[…] “the charming,” in much the same way that Kant did. Though S. entirely dismisses the mechanisms of aesthetic appreciation Kant described, his resultant aesthetics is similar to Kant’s, in that the beautiful in art can’t be […]

[…] this dilemma? A lot of our discussion about this revolved around pop vs. experimental, and, contra Kant, the beauty of imperfection, which the Japanese call […]

[…] episode 105, we explained Kant's account of how we recognize beauty and and in episode 107, we presented the view of one of Kant's influences, Edmund Burke, on the […]

[…] necessity), aesthetic (and ultimately ascetic, i.e., denying of immediate pleasures) stance with Kant's theory of taste (ep. 105), and also explicitly discusses Schopenhauer's view (ep. […]

[…] Kant: What Is Beauty? […]

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Plato’s Aesthetics

If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into beauty, or another aesthetic value, and art, then the striking feature of Plato’s dialogues is that he devotes as much time as he does to both topics and yet treats them oppositely. Art, mostly as represented by poetry, is closer to a greatest danger than any other phenomenon Plato speaks of. Beauty is close to a greatest good. Can there be such a thing as “Plato’s aesthetics” that contains both positions?

Strictly speaking the phrase “Plato’s aesthetics” is anachronistic, given that this area of philosophy only came to be identified in the last few centuries. But even those who take aesthetics more broadly and permit the term will still find something exploratory in Plato’s treatments of art and beauty. He might be best described as seeking to discover the vocabulary and issues of aesthetics. For this reason Plato’s readers will not come upon a single aesthetic theory in the dialogues. For the same reason they are uniquely situated to watch core concepts of aesthetics being defined: beauty, imitation, inspiration .

There is something more to be said about the label “aesthetics” that is important about Plato. One normally speaks of aesthetics or a philosophy of art when the theory covers more than a single art form. For understandable reasons the Platonic dialogues focus on poetry, with special energy directed toward dramatic poetry. Tragedy and comedy were culturally dominant art forms during Socrates’ lifetime and much of Plato’s. Innovative, memorable, and now long enduring, Athenian drama invited scrutiny. Even so, and tellingly, when the dialogues comment on poetry they also look at it in tandem with the visual arts – not capriciously either, but in keeping with an ancient Greek tradition of comparing art forms – and in this approach toward an overarching theory they deserve to be described as practicing or undertaking the philosophy of art.

James Porter argues that analogizing between art forms characterized a culture of sensualist aesthetic thinking before Plato and so makes possible the early appearance of a general idea “art.” Poetry commented on architecture, drama on rhetoric (Porter 2010, 188). In another fashion tragedy compared itself to sculpture (Pappas 2012b, 325). Even if one finds some of these interpretations of aesthetic analysis controversial, there is no denying that the Homeric “shield of Achilles” passage ( Iliad 18.479–609) implies a parallel between the shield’s presentation of war and peace and the treatment of those subjects in Homer. What Hephaestus depicts on the shield, Homer depicts in his epics (Cunningham 2007, Francis 2009).

The poet Simonides makes analogizing between art forms explicit. “Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting that speaks” (Plutarch The Glory of the Athenians 3.1, 346f-347a). A common element unites the forms of art even though poetry casts itself as the standard that painting fails to achieve (possessing as it does the voice that painting lacks).

Plato’s explication of poetic mimêsis by means of the mimêsis in painting (see below on Republic Book 10) belongs in this analogizing tradition, as Aristotle’s account of mimêsis will after him ( Poetics Chapter 4 1448b4–19; Halliwell 2002, 178). On both theories, painting and poetry belong together as fellow species within a larger artistic genus. However faulty the theory that joins them, it attempts to describe the broader genus.

At the same time, Plato appears to consider painting on its own terms, and not merely illustrating a process also found in poetry. Many passages speak in approving terms of painting and sculpture, or recognize the skill involved in making them as a technê “profession, craft” ( Ion 532e–533a; Gorgias 430c, 448b, 453c–d, 503e; Protagoras 318b–c; see Demand 1975, Halliwell 2002, 37–43). Even the famously anti-poetic Republic contains positive references to paintings and drawings. Sometimes these are metaphors for acts of imagination and political reform (472d, 500e–501c), sometimes literal images whose attractiveness helps to form a young ruler’s character (400d–401a), in any case visual arts appreciated on their own terms and for their own sake.

When the Republic treats painting and poetry together, in other words, it does so possessed of an independent sense of visual depiction. It aims at developing a philosophy of art.

The subject “Plato’s aesthetics” calls for care. If perennially footnoted by later philosophers Plato has also been much thumbnailed. Clichés accompany his name. It is worth going slowly through the main topics of Plato’s aesthetics— not in the search for a theory unlike anything that has been said, but so that background shading and details may emerge, for a result that perhaps contrasts with the commonplaces about his thought as a human face contrasts with the cartoon reduction of it.

In what follows, citations to passages in Plato use “Stephanus pages,” based on a sixteenth-century edition of Plato’s works. The page numbers in that edition, together with the letters a–e, have become standard. Almost every translation of Plato includes the Stephanus page numbers and letters in the margins, or at the top of the page. Thus, “ Symposium 204b” refers to the same brief passage in every edition and every translation of Plato.

1.1 Hippias Major

1.2 beauty and art, 1.3 beauty and nature, 1.4 the form of beauty, 2.1 mimêsis in aristophanes, 2.2 republic 2–3: impersonation, 2.3 republic 10: copy-making, 2.4 sophist, 2.5 closing assessment, 3.2 phaedrus, 4. imitation, inspiration, beauty and the occasional wisdom in poetry, other internet resources, related entries.

The study of Plato on beauty begins with a routine caution. The Greek adjective kalon only approximates to the English “beautiful.” Not everything Plato says about a kalos , kalê , or kalon thing will belong in a summary of his aesthetic theories.

Readers can take the distinction between Greek and English terms too far. It always feels more scrupulous to argue against equating terms from different languages than to treat them interchangeably. And the discussion bears more on assessments of Platonic ethical theory than on whatever subject may be called Plato’s aesthetics.

But even given these qualifications the reader should know how to distinguish what is beautiful from what is kalon . The terms have overlapping but distinct ranges of application. A passage in Plato may speak of a face or body that someone finds kalon , or for that matter a statue, a spoon, a tree, a grassy place to rest ( Phaedrus 230b). In those cases, “beautiful” makes a natural equivalent, and certainly a less stilted one than the alternatives. Yet even here it is telling that Plato far more often uses kalon for a face or body than for works of art and natural scenery. As far as unambiguous beauties are concerned, he has a smaller set in mind than we do (Kosman 2010).

More typically kalon appears in contexts to which “beautiful” would fit awkwardly if at all. For both Plato and Aristotle—and in many respects for Greek popular morality— kalon plays a role as ethical approbation, not by meaning the same thing that agathon “good” means, but as a special complement to goodness. At times kalon narrowly means “noble,” often and more loosely “admirable.” The compound kalos k’agathos , the aristocratic ideal, is all-round praise for a man (i.e. an adult male human being), not “beautiful and good” as its components would translate separately, but closer to “splendid and upright.” Here kalon is entirely an ethical term. Calling virtue beautiful feels misplaced in modern terms, or even perverse; calling wisdom beautiful, as the Symposium does (204b), will sound like a mistake (Kosman 2010, 348–350).

Some commentators try to keep kalon and “beautiful” close to synonymous despite differences in their semantic ranges (Hyland 2008). David Konstan rejuvenated the question by emphasizing the beauty not in uses of the adjective kalon but in the related noun kallos (Konstan 2014, Konstan 2015). As welcome as Konstan’s shift of focus is regarding Greek writing as a whole, it runs into difficulties when we read Plato; for the noun kallos carries associations of physical, visual attractiveness, and Plato is wary of the desire that such attractiveness arouses. His dialogues, and notably the Hippias Major , more often examine to kalon when asking about a property named by a noun, wanting to know “what it is to be kalon ,” or (as Jonathan Fine has rightly emphasized) “what makes all beautiful things beautiful and is in no way ugly.”

Besides seeking a Greek equivalent for “beautiful,” translators from Greek look for a different word when rendering kalon into English. One understandably popular choice is “fine,” which applies to most things labeled kalon and is also appropriate to ethical and aesthetic contexts (so Woodruff 1983). There are fine suits and string quartets but also fine displays of courage. Of course modern English-speakers have fine sunsets and fine dining as well, this word being even broader than kalon . That is not to mention fine points or fine print. And whereas people frequently ask what beauty really consists in, so that a conversation on the topic might actually have taken place, it is hard to imagine worrying over “what the fine is” or “what is really fine.”

The deciding criterion will be not philological but philosophical. Studying the Hippias Major each reader should ask whether Plato’s treatment of to kalon sounds relevant to questions one asks about beauty today.

The Hippias Major was considered Platonic in antiquity, but faced accusations of inauthenticity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Tarrant 1927). One peculiarity of the dialogue is Socrates’ extended pretext that his own objections to Hippias come from an unnamed third party (who sounds a lot like Socrates) who has levied these same arguments against him (e.g. 288d, 290e, 304d). This feature of the Hippias Major may read as un-Platonic, although to strikes some as a sign of Plato’s wit (Guthrie 1975, IV, 176).

It has also been noted that Aristotle quotes from Plato’s much shorter dialogue Hippias Minor ( Metaphysics 5.30 1025a6–8). If Plato would not have written two works with the same name, the longer Hippias Major must be a forgery. But after all he may well have given two works the same title.

Today the debate seems to lie in the past. Most scholars agree that Plato wrote the Hippias Major , and its sustained inquiry into beauty is seen as central to Platonic aesthetics.

The Hippias Major follows Socrates and the famous sophist Hippias through a sequence of attempts to define to kalon . Socrates badgers Hippias, in classic Socratic ways, to identify beauty’s general nature, and Hippias answers with definitions, three in all. For instance, “a beautiful young woman is beautiful” (287e). This one scarcely appears to qualify as a definition, and could be taken for one of those non-definition “mere examples” that Socrates complains about, in other dialogues, as not even on the road to a general account ( Euthyphro 5d–6e, Laches 190e–191e, Meno 72a–b). After all Hippias has put himself forward as a fact-filled polymath. In real life he compiled the first list of Olympic victors, and might have written the first history of philosophy. On that reading, his over-ingestion of specifics has left him unable to digest his experience and generalize to a philosophical definition.

On the other hand Socrates makes no methodological rebuke to Hippias of the kind that other interlocutors like Euthyphro hear. He might realize that Hippias is proposing an exemplar of beauty, not a mere token but a standard and even a way of thinking generally about that property (Politis 2021, 17). Understood in these terms, Hippias knows that Socrates is seeking an essence for beauty, although he still goes wrong in proposing exemplars known from Homer – woman, tripod, mare, cauldron, gold, two-handled bowl ( Iliad 23.261–270, 539–611) and appealing to Greek aristocrats (Gold 2021).

After giving up on seeking a definition from Hippias, Socrates tries out three of his own. These are philosophical generalizations but they fail too, and—again in classic Socratic mode—the dialogue ends unresolved. In one excursus Socrates says beauty “is appropriate [ prepei ]” and proposes defining it as “what is appropriate [ to prepon ]” (290d). Although ending in refutation this discussion (to 294e) is worth a look as the anticipation of a modern debate. Philosophers of the eighteenth century argue over whether an object is beautiful by satisfying the definition of the object, or independently of that definition (Guyer 1993). Kant calls the beauty that is appropriateness “dependent beauty” ( Critique of Judgment , section 16). Such beauty threatens to become a species of the good. Within the accepted corpus of genuine Platonic works beauty is never subsumed within the good, the appropriate, or the beneficial. Plato seems to belong in the same camp as Kant in this respect. (On Platonic beauty and the good see Barney 2010.) Nevertheless he is no simple sensualist about beauty. The very temptation in Plato to link the beautiful with the good and to assess it intellectually is part of why Porter calls him and Aristotle “formalists,” who diverted ancient theorizing about art from its sensualist origins (Porter 2010).

Despite its inconclusiveness the Hippias Major reflects the view of beauty found elsewhere in Plato:

• Beauty behaves as canonical Forms do. It possesses the reality that they have and is discovered through the same dialectical inquiry that brings other Forms to light. Socrates wants Hippias to explain a) the property that is known when any examples of beauty are known ( essence of beauty), b) the cause of all occurrences of beauty, and more precisely c) the cause not of the appearance of beauty but of its real being (286d, 287c, 289d, 292c, 294e, 297b).
• Nevertheless beauty is not just one Form among others. It stands out among those beings, for it bears some close relationship to the good (296d), even though Socrates argues that the two are distinct (296e ff., 303e ff.).
• Socrates and Hippias appeal to artworks as examples of beautiful things but do not treat those as central cases (290a–b, 297e–298a). Artworks are neither the aristocrat’s prize possessions and status symbols, nor the countercultural philosopher’s inherently valuable items. So too generally Plato conducts his inquiry into beauty at a distance from his discussion of art. (But the Republic and the Laws both contain exceptions to this generalization: Lear 2010, 361.)

These three aspects of Platonic beauty work together and reflect beauty’s unique place in Plato’s metaphysics, something almost both visible and intelligible.

The three principles of beauty in the Hippias Major also apply in the Symposium , Plato’s other analysis of beauty. In the Symposium Socrates claims to be quoting his teacher Diotima on the subject of love, and in the lesson attributed to her she calls beauty the object of every love’s yearning. She spells out a soul’s progress toward ever-purer beauty, from one body to all, then through all beautiful souls to laws and kinds of knowledge, finally reaching beauty itself (210a–211d). The object of erotic longing, despite being contained within visible experience, can induce a desirous (and thoughtful) observer’s progress toward purely intelligible beauty.

Diotima describes the poet’s task as the begetting of wisdom and other virtues (209a). Ultimately desiring what is beautiful, the poet produces works of verse. And who (Diotima asks) would not envy Homer or Hesiod (209d)? But aside from these passages the Symposium seems prepared to treat anything but a poem as an exemplar of beauty. In a similar spirit the Philebus ’s examples of pure sensory beauty exclude pictures (51b–d).

The Republic contains tokens of Plato’s reluctance to associate poetry with beauty. The dialogue’s first discussion of poetry, whose context is education, censors poems that corrupt the young (377b–398b). Then almost immediately Socrates speaks of cultivating a fondness for beauty among the young guardians. Let them see gracefulness ( euschêmosunê ) in paintings and illustrative weaving, a sibling to virtue (401a). Their taste for beauty will help them prefer noble deeds over ugly vulgar ones (401b–d, 403c). How can Plato have seen the value of beauty to education and not mentioned the subject in his earlier criticisms? Why couldn’t this part of the Republic concede that false and pernicious poems affect the young through their beauty?

The answer is that the Republic denies the legitimacy of the beauty in poetry. Republic 10 calls that beauty deceptive. Take away the decorative language that makes a poetic sentiment sound right and put it into ordinary words, and it becomes unremarkable, as young people’s faces beautified by youth later show themselves as the plain looks they are (601b). The Republic can hardly deny some attractive effect that poetry has, for people enjoy the way poems can present experience to them. Yet it resists calling this attractiveness beauty.

As if to accentuate the difference between art and nature, Plato’s reader finds emphatic and repeated assertions of appreciation for the beauty in nature.

Plato stands out among ancient authors where the admiration of natural scenes and settings is concerned. Pausanias’s Description of Greece (the closest thing to a travel guide in antiquity) seems not to notice the spectacular views in the countryside it moves through (Pretzler 2007, 59–62). If anything, bucolic scenes myth provided opportunities for rape (Homer Hymn to Demeter 5–14; Euripides Ion 889ff.). But Plato’s Phaedrus follows Socrates and young Phaedrus on their walk through the countryside until they stop and sit and cool their feet. Socrates declares it a kalê … katagôgê “beautiful spot to rest” (230b). This may be the only extant Greek passage that calls any area or natural scenery beautiful.

Further from the nature that surrounds human observers is the ouranos , a word that means “heaven” but that in Plato’s Timaeus also denotes the visible world (28a–b). The Timaeus calls the ouranos and the whole kosmos beautiful (28b, 29a, 30a–d; see 53b, 54a, 68e on the beauty of the world’s elements). One does not have to guard against or qualify one’s admiration for heavenly beauty. Taking in the fine sight of the stars has taught human souls number, the inquiry into nature as a whole, and therefore philosophy (47a–b). The pseudo-Platonic Epinomis , which shows Plato’s influence, likewise traces thoughts of number to astronomical observations (977a–978e). The Laws credits the movement of the stars with inspiring belief in gods (966d–e). Any serious person who admires nature’s beauty will learn from it.

It is fundamental to understanding Platonic beauty as part of Plato’s aesthetics that Plato sees no opposition between the pleasures that beauty brings and the goals of philosophy. The Timaeus suffices to make that point when it credits contemplation of the heavens with the origins of philosophy.

More broadly, many passages associate a Form with beauty: Cratylus 439c; Euthydemus 301a; Laws 655c; Phaedo 65d, 75d, 100b; Phaedrus 254b; Parmenides 130b; Philebus 15a; Republic 476b, 493e, 507b. Plato mentions beauty as often as he speaks of any property that admits of philosophical conceptualization, and for which a Form therefore exists. Thanks to the features of Forms as such, we know that this entity being referred to must be something properly called beauty, whose nature can be articulated without recourse to the natures of particular beautiful things. (See especially Phaedo 79a and Phaedrus 247c on properties of this Form.)

Beauty is Plato’s example of a Form as frequently as it is for a pair of reasons. On one hand it bears every mark of the Forms. It is an evaluative concept as much as justice and courage are, and suffers from disputes over its meaning as much as they do. The Theory of Forms seeks to guarantee stable referents for disputed evaluative terms; so if anything needs a Form, beauty does, and it will have a Form if any property does.

In general, a Form F differs from an individual F thing in that the property F may be predicated unambiguously and plainly of the Form. The Form F is F . An individual F thing both is and is not F . In this sense the same property F may be predicated only equivocally of the individual (e.g. Republic 479a–c). Plato’s analysis of equivocally F individuals ( Cratylus 439d–e, Symposium 211a) recalls observations that everyone makes about beautiful objects. They fade with time; require an offsetting ugly detail; elicit disagreements among observers; lose their beauty outside their context (adult shoes on children’s feet). Such limitations of individual things are rarely as clear where other Form properties are concerned as they are for beauty. Odd numbers may fail to be odd in some hard-to-explain way, and large objects may or may not grow small as the years go by, but the ways in which beautiful things fall short of perfection are obvious even to the unphilosophical.

While typical qua Form, physical beauty is atypical in being a Form that humans want to know. The process known as anamnêsis or recollection is more plausible for beauty than it is for most other properties. The philosophical merit of equivocally F things is that they come bearing signs of their incompleteness, so that the inquisitive mind wants to know more ( Republic 523c–524d). Therefore, beauty promises more effective reflection than any other property of things. Beauty alone is both a Form and a sensory experience ( Phaedrus 250d).

So the Phaedrus (250d–256b) and Symposium ignore people’s experiences of other properties when they describe the first movement into philosophizing. Beautiful things remind souls of their mystery as no other visible objects do, and in his optimistic moments Plato welcomes people’s attention to them.

The optimistic moments are not easy to sustain. To make beauty effective for learning, Plato needs to rely on its desirability (as foregrounded in Konstan 2015), but also on the soul’s ability to transfer its desiring from the visible to the intelligible ( Philebus 65e). Plato is ambivalent about visual experience. Sight may be like knowledge metaphorically; metonymically it calls to mind the ignorant senses (Pappas 2015, 49). The sight of beauty must overcome itself to become the higher sight of a higher beauty.

When the transfer of attention and desire succeeds, beauty’s unmatched pedagogical effects show why Plato talks about its goodness and good consequences, sometimes even its identity with “the good” ( Laws 841c; Philebus 66a–b; Republic 401c; Symposium 201c, 205e; but the relationship between beautiful and good, especially in Symposium , is controversial: White 1989). These desirable effects also explain why Plato speaks grudgingly of beauty in art and poetry, lest the dangerous arts find a place in the development of good thinking. Another question matters more than either poetry or beauty does: What leads a mind toward knowledge and the Forms? Things of beauty do so excellently well. Poems mostly don’t. When poems (or paintings) set the mind running along unphilosophical tracks away from what is abstract and intelligible, the attractions they possess will reveal themselves as meretricious. The corrupting cognitive effect exercised by poems demonstrates their inability to function as Plato knows the beautiful object to function.

The corrupting effect needs to be spelled out. What prevents poems from behaving as beautiful objects do? The answer will have to address the orienting question in Plato’s aesthetics, namely: What fosters philosophical enlightenment, and what obstructs it?

2. Imitation

The top candidate for the cause of error (or something worse than mere ignorance) in art is mimêsis , a word most commonly translated into English as “imitation.” Other translations include “representation” and “emulation.” And to make things confusing, the transliterated Greek word sans diacritical mark has come to be accepted as English (“mimesis”).

All the translations capture something of the word’s meaning. As long as “imitation” is used with the awareness that it will not mean everything that mimêsis does, it makes a serviceable translation. “Imitate” functions well enough as the verb mimeisthai ; so does “mimic.” (See Sörbom 1966; also Marušič 2011.)

One may just use the Greek mimêsis , as this discussion will do. For simplicity’s sake some prefer the now-English “mimesis.” But this last choice brings a risk. The English word “mimesis” has begun picking up its own contexts and connotations, becoming English proportionately as it ceases to substitute for the Greek word.

Besides mimêsis Plato sometimes speaks of a mimêma . “Imitation” like mimêsis can refer either to a process or to its outcome. You engage in the act of imitation in order to produce an imitation. A mimêma however is only ever a copy, not also the copying act that produced it.

(Mateo Duque was of much help in thinking through issues in the coming sections.)

Authors before Plato used mimêsis more vaguely than he did, neither attaching the word to a poetic process nor implying its fraudulence —with one important exception. The comedies of Aristophanes, obsessed with Euripides and with all tragedy ( Birds 787, 1444; Clouds 1091; Plutus 423–4), introduce comments about tragic stagecraft that say mimeisthai and mimêsis in pejorative ways.

Although comedy is sometimes identified as antagonist to philosophy in the “ancient quarrel” that Plato speaks of between philosophy and poetry (Most 2011), Aristophanes has also long been seen as Plato’s precursor in the moralistic critique of poetry. The two share conservative sensibilities that outweigh Aristophanes’ slander of Socrates in Clouds (Nussbaum 1980). But Aristophanes’ influence on Plato also extends to the nature of mimêsis . He uses that word in a technical sense that describes what actors do in a play, and with Platonic suggestions of fraud or concealment.

In addition to the face-off between Aeschylus and Euripides in Frogs , one might cite Aristophanes’ Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria , which calls mimêsis a disruption of life and opposes it to nature. Moreover Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria finds an ambiguity in dramatic imitation that anticipates Plato. In that play, as in the Republic , mimêsis mixes together composition and performance, the invention of characters and the portrayal of them (Pappas 1999).

The Aristophanic ambiguity between composition and performance appears, in Plato, in Book 3 of the Republic , which is one of the two dialogues (along with Laws , in Book 4) that investigates mimêsis as a characteristic specific to poetry.

Books 2 and 3 of the Republic assess poetry’s role in the curriculum for the city’s guardian class. At least ostensibly, their purpose is pedagogical. The first part of this argument runs from the final pages of Book 2 through the first part of Book 3, condemning the images of gods and demigods that Homer and the tragedians have produced (377e–392c). Pernicious stories about gods and heroes blaspheme the divine, and set bad examples for young warriors. Socrates focuses on the harmful effect of saying that the gods quarrel (378c), and that Cronus castrated his father and was overthrown in turn by Zeus. Gods are good and should not be said to cause harm (379b).

The emphasis on content and the focus on what children hear make this part of the discussion seem to have only limited relevance to aesthetics. But in the first place, the restrictions on poetry expand as the argument goes on, from what “nurses and mothers” must attend to (377c) to proclamations that some stories “shouldn’t be told” (378b), that no one should hear of a god’s causing evil (380b–c), and that a play asserting such a thing shouldn’t be allowed to train a chorus (383c). What at first should not be heard by the young finally should not be heard at all.

In the second place, strictures on what may be said about the gods goes beyond content to hint at the formal analysis that comes in Book 3. When ruling out tales about divinities in disguise, Socrates says that gods would not change their form. A god would not be a goêtês “sorcerer” (380d). The comment is both the oblique first connection between poetry and sorcery in the Republic , and also the first mention of impersonation. Gods who change their form are playing a dramatic part, and practicing sorcery when they do.

Socrates concludes his criticism of how poetry presents gods and heroes and asks about the lexis “style” of narration. Poetic narration can take place through narration alone, through mimêsis alone, or by combining the two (392d).

Already this way of differentiating among storytelling methods proceeds irregularly, as if one were to analyze walking into pure walking, running, and a combination of the two, and declared that to be an explanation of running . Such an analysis would mark the act of running as deviant walking. Likewise the taxonomy of narrations presumes that mimêsis is deviant.

The subsequent pages continue treating mimêsis as something comprehensible only under the sign of anomaly and failure. Socrates defines imitation, develops two arguments against it, and finally proclaims that no mimetic poetry will be admitted into the city that the Republic is founding.

The defining example establishes mimêsis as impersonation or emulation. Homer’s poems alternate between third-person accounts of events (in which Homer narrates in his own voice) and speeches made by the characters involved in those events. In the latter instances, Homer “makes himself like” the characters speaking, deceptively producing a speech “as if he were someone else” (393b). The poet “hides himself” (393d), thus even losing personal autonomy.

When Homer recounts Agamemnon’s rebuke to the priest Chryses, Socrates says, he uses the abusive language that a warriors’ king would use when such a king refused to show mercy (393a–c).

This passage leaves the presentation of character ambiguous between the act of writing or composing the words of a character like Agamemnon, and the act of reciting (performing, acting out) those words. Epic poets likely put together their works and also performed them, therefore acting out the parts; dramatic poets may well have spoken parts in character as they wrote; such independent dramatic traditions as the Japanese noh featured players who both wrote plays and acted in them (Hare 2008, 40). The ambiguity between writing and reciting (which already appeared in Aristophanes) lets Socrates deploy more than one argument against the presentation of characters.

The main argument is blunt but clear, and it is plausible enough. What the new city really does not want is the presentation of base types, because performing such parts fosters the behaviors that are found in the persons being mimicked (395c–397e). Attempts to read this impersonation as attention to appearance alone (Lear 2011) have the advantage of unifying Book 3 with Book 10, but sacrifice the psychological simplicity behind the argument.

If acting a part does lead to taking on the characteristics of the part, then in one respect the Republic has a powerful point to make, and in another respect generates a misleading argument. The point is powerful inasmuch as it lets the newly formed city ban all portrayals of vicious and ignoble characters but not those of brave soldiers, philosophers, and other wholesome types. Moreover the factual premise is believable. Taking on someone else’s traits and tics can have a more lasting effect than the Republic’s critics sometimes acknowledge. Actors even today comment on how a role changed them. Those who play lovers in movies sometimes fall in love.

Even this most plausible part of the argument runs into trouble. Plato’s list of things unworthy of imitation proves surprisingly commodious. Alongside villains one finds women, slaves, animals, musical instruments, gears and pulleys, and sounds of water. And these last examples beg the question. Sounding like machinery does not make the imitator more like a gear or pulley. Nor do actors start to behave and think as if they were flowing water. The impersonatory act must be a deranged practice only insofar as all impersonation is deranged. But that more fundamental derangement had been what the argument was aiming to prove.

What significantly misleads in this argument amounts to more than the passing hyperbole. The case against mimêsis exploits the ambiguity between impersonation as something a writer does and impersonation as the performer’s task. Eric Havelock (1963) stressed the importance of this ambiguity to Book 3, but understated the degree to which Plato exploited the ambiguity. The most convincing part of Book 3 has to assume that mimêsis is performance, both because such effects as thunder are mimicked in performance, not on the page; and because the bad effects of impersonation on character make more sense when describing young actors’ playing a vicious role than grown playwrights in the act of writing that role.

On the other hand performance does not involve a whole population. It brings about the worst effects to a fraction of the city. The Athenian population mostly did not perform dramatic roles. They may have enjoyed drama in the theater, but banning plays from the city calls for seeing something inherently wrong with dramatic works themselves, whether as performed or just as written, and so with a quality in them that follows from the mimêsis in the composition of them. The conclusion to this passage makes clear that the city will ban all mimetic works:

If a man were to arrive in the city whose wisdom [ sophia ] empowered him to become everything and to mimic all things—together with the poems he wanted to perform [ epideixasthai ]— we would worship him as someone holy [ hieron ] and wonderful and pleasant, but tell him there is no man like him in our city, nor by our traditional law [ themis ] can come to be here; and we would send him off to another city after pouring myrrh on his head and crowning him with wool. (398a)

The religious language is lavish. No ordinary deeds are being excluded but ones that smell of sacred power. And the city fathers running mimetic poetry out of town have broadened their scope from the young guardians’ education to the cultural life of a community. The literary representation of characters will receive no hearing anywhere. It is even doubtful whether the city will permit dramatic poems to circulate in written form, as if their very potential for being performed rendered them toxic. The sins of performance extend to the allegedly performative author of dramatic parts.

The poet is a visitor because mimetic poetry has no natural home in the philosophers’ town. (Maybe Plato is thinking of literal outsiders, like tragic playwrights from Syracuse: Monoson 2012, 163.) Moreover he arrives offering to recite his poems. That they are his makes him a poet , that he comes to recite them makes him a performer . Thus he embodies the ambiguity built into Book 3’s definition of mimêsis . If the fate of imitative composition stands or falls with the fate of imitative performance, a reasonable worry about behaviors that young people experiment with balloons into an argument against a body of literature. The equivocation between performance and composition lets the argument proceed to its grand conclusion.

Book 3 took its assessment of poetry beyond criticism into aesthetics by developing imitation as a formal concept. This is to say 1) that one can distinguish poetic mimêsis from poetic narration by looking for a formal element in the poetry; and 2) that mimêsis may make poetry more deleterious than it would otherwise be, but does not work these bad effects by itself, only when the characters represented are bad to begin with. The definition of imitation in Book 3 entails no general ideas of similarity or likeness, and it remains confined to one art form.

Book 10 will look at imitation from a different perspective. Space does not permit a review of all existing proposals about how to square the two passages. Whether Books 3 and 10 offer compatible accounts of mimêsis , and how one might make them compatible, remains the most controversial question about Plato’s aesthetics. (See Belfiore 1984, Halliwell 1988, Nehamas 1982; and for a superb summary of the main proposals, Naddaff 2002, 136n8. Lear 2011 is a recent argument in favor of the two passages’ agreement with one another.) Still one may trust a few summative statements. Republic 10 revises the formal aspects of mimêsis with an imagistic depiction that entails more than direct quotation. The enhanced concept cannot be understood without reference to the Republic ’s psychological theory. And in its expanded form the term refers to something bad in itself.

If Books 2 and 3 presented an account of the content in poetry and then an analysis of its form, Book 10 may be said to show how form invents content (to use a phrase attributed to the novelist Gilbert Sorrentino). The result is that, where the critique of mimêsis in Book 3 allowed a loophole making representation acceptable if it portrayed virtuous characters, the argument in Book 10 will promise that such an outcome will never happen (605a). Good mimêsis presents bad people.

As the Sophist also does (see below), Book 10 of the Republic treats mimêsis as a process at work in more art forms than drama. The topic in this passage, roughly the first half of Book 10 (595a–608b), is a mimêsis common to painting and poetry and much like picturing or copying. It is a relationship between a visible original and its visible likeness.

As Book 10 begins, Socrates links the coming treatment with what Book 3 had said about imitation and also establishes the difference between the passages. What follows will defend Book 3’s banishment of “imitative poetry” in terms that the Republic developed after Book 3. “Now that we have differentiated the soul’s eidê ,” Socrates says, the danger of imitation becomes more evident (595a–b). An eidos is a kind, and this phrase “kinds of soul” is usually taken to mean the parts of the soul that Book 4 distinguished (435b–441c, 445d). The Republic ’s theory of reason, spirit, and desire can enlarge what had been in Book 3 no more than suspicion about the impersonation of ignoble people. The new argument will charge poetry with upsetting the balance among the soul’s parts. (Daniel Mailick contributed to this discussion of the Republic ’s psychological theory.)

In all Socrates presents three theses during this first half of Book 10:

• Poetic mimêsis , like the kind found in painting, is the imitation of appearance alone, and its products rank far below truth. (596e–602c)
• Therefore poetic mimêsis corrupts the soul, weakening the rational impulse’s control over the person’s other drives and desires. (602c–608b)
• It should therefore be banned from the good city.

The argument supporting (1) seeks to spell out how badly poetry and painting fare at grasping and communicating knowledge. Partly because they do so badly, but also for other reasons, mimetic arts bring moral and psychological ill effects (2).

The words “imitation of appearance” in (1) follow from a three-way differentiation:

• Form (of couch, of table) made by a god.
• Individual things (couches, tables) made by humans.
• Paintings (of couch or table) made by imitators.

The carpenter works with eyes aiming “toward [ pros ]” the Form (596b)—not with eyes on the Form, but looking in that direction—so the individual couch the carpenter makes is something less than the Form: an honest failing after a decent try. If the Form is an object of knowledge, human creators at least possess true opinion (601e).

Thus category II is never referred to as a realm of imitation, and – as a result – the table depicted in a painting does not turn into (in the popular phrase) the “imitation of an imitation.” The argument against art does not focus on what a carpenter or other skilled worker does in making an artifact. Nevertheless Plato’s phrase “imitation of appearance” does characterize artistic mimêsis as a compounded problem. Imitation intensifies a weakness present in existing objects; it not only fails but fails doubly. The good-faith effort at approximating to the Form of the couch produced a visible object. Visible objects represented in artistic imitation possess both intelligible and visible properties, and that imperfection in objects leaves them vulnerable to being imitated only in their visible aspects.

Those visible aspects are the subject matter for a visual representation. When you look at a couch from different perspectives, you are still looking at the same couch, when that object is understood intelligibly. But the couch seen from different perspectives makes for different paintings. Therefore the painting must be not an image of the couch but an image of its appearance (598a).

The same difference applies if the painter depicts a shoemaker (598b–c), erring in that representation of a human professional by dint of lacking the professional’s knowledge. The painter gives us a shoemaker as seen by one who has no idea what shoemakers know, as the dramatic poet represents everything in a character except what that character knows. A full and true account of a doctor must include medical knowledge, or else you are not describing the reality of the doctor.

Skipping ahead for a moment, the Republic ’s reader finds a second three-way distinction (601c–602a) that criticizes imitation from another perspective:

• User (of a flute or bridle) who knows.
• Maker (of flute or bridle) who has correct belief.
• Imitator (of flute or bridle) who is ignorant.

This intriguing new list is hard to make sense of. The three items belong alongside the previous three-part ranking. The carpenter who makes a table resembles the leatherworker making the bridle; both tripartitions put the visual imitator lowest. But why do flautists and jockeys suddenly appear in the top spot, in place of a god so supreme as to create even Forms?

The answer might appear among the particular manufactured objects that these passages refer to. For the reader familiar with Greek religion, both rankings evoke Athena. The couch- and table-making carpenter practices a trade whose patron is Athena, while myths known to Plato depict her as the original user of both flute (Pindar 12th Pythian Ode ) and bridle (Pindar 13th Olympian Ode ). These associations put the imitator at the opposite pole from a god, rendering the products of imitation not only lowly nothings but malevolently profane, even blasphemous. Athena’s technologies permit the forces that would threaten civilized life to find their place within a city, but imitators exist outside the space of these civilizing technologies (Pappas 2013). One need not subject the passage to so much pressure in the effort to make it fit alongside the earlier tripartite hierarchy, but those who see religious lines running through the Republic ’s arguments about art might want to develop this interpretation.

The argument thus far posits painting as the default case of mimêsis (Golden 1975, Nehamas 1982, Belfiore 1984, Moss 2007). But Socrates springboards beyond pictorial art to condemn tragedy and its “father” Homer. Homer was ignorant, never taught a useful thing to anyone (599b–600e). This apparent ad hominem attack is designed to show that poetry too imitates appearance. For that purpose it suffices to show that one esteemed poet writes without knowledge. If great poetry can come out of someone ignorant, then poetry must not require knowledge. Even if ignorance is not necessary for the composition of poetry Homer’s example demonstrates that the two are compatible.

An obvious complaint comes to mind. “Someone can be ignorant and still write great poetry!” Plato nods in glum agreement, for this is exactly the problem. Nothing good will come of an activity that can not only be attempted ignorantly but even succeeded at in ignorance. The success of the ignorant suffices to prove that no knowledge comes into play in poetic imitation. Poetry too imitates no more than appearance.

The pictorial sense of mimêsis now has eclipsed the embodying or role-playing sense that the argument in Book 3 exploited. Aristotle will follow the Republic in conceiving mimêsis in both ways, although he keeps the two separate. When Aristotle identifies two natural grounds for the appeal of mimêsis , one describes enactment ( Poetics 4 1448b6) and the other pictorial depiction ( Poetics 4 1448b12). Book 10 is trying to attack poetry that enacts human characters on the grounds that it thereby resembles pictures.

As if to bridge the gap between the two critiques, Socrates goes on to argue that poetry harms the soul. He says that poetry’s illusions fortify the worst part of the soul and turn it against the best. The first stretch of this argument (602c–603b) uses theoretical language taken from the Republic ’s psychological theory, while the second (603b–608b) appeals to observable phenomena surrounding performances of tragedies.

Socrates returns to his analogy between poetry and painting. If you are partly taken in by a painting’s tricked-up table apparition but you partly spot the falseness, which part of you does which? The soul’s rational impulse must be the part that knows the painting is not a real table. But Book 4 had established a fundamental principle: When the soul inclines in more than one direction at a time, this conflict represents the activity of more than one faculty or part of the soul (436b; recalled in Book 10’s argument at 602e). So being taken in by an optical or artistic illusion must be the act of some part of the soul distinct from reason. Painting and tragedy both inspire reactions that do not come from one’s calculating capacity.

Invoking Book 4’s psychological theory integrates the critique of poetry of Book 10 into the Republic ’s overarching argument. The Republic identifies justice with a balance among reason, spirit or anger, and the desires. This controlled balance is the happiest state available for human souls, and the most virtuous. Because imitation undoes the soul’s justice, it brings both vice and misery.

The Republic does not specify the irrational part in question. Thinking the sun is the size of your hand does not feel like either anger overwhelming you or desires tempting. What do illusions have to do with irrationality of motive?

Again commentaries differ. A complex and fertile debate continues to worry over how perceptual error undermines mental health or moral integrity (Nehamas 1982, Moss 2007). Part of the answer comes from Books 8–9, which sketch four character types graded from best to worst. These are eidê in a different sense of that word, meaning not the parts or separate motives within one soul but the species that one might sort souls into. This taxonomy of soul-types deserves to play a larger role than it has in the discussion of imitation.

The pleasures of the lowest soul- eidos are illusory and feed on illusion. Unreal appearances produce unreliable pleasures, which are all the keener and madder for the ontologically light quality of their instigating images. Book 9 says that desire delights not in true beings but in “idols [ eidôlois ] of true pleasure” and painted images, eskiagraphêmenais (586b). Skiagraphia – the root within this last word – was an impressionistic manner of painting that juxtaposed contrasting hues to create illusionistic shadow and intensify color (Keuls 1974, Demand 1975, Petraki 2018). Plato disapproved specifically of skiagraphia ( Parmenides 165c–d, Phaedo 69b). In fact the Republic ’s attacks on painting are sometimes interpreted narrowly as applying only to skiagraphia .

Thus where Book 9 examines the desirous part of the soul and finds its objects to be mere idols, Book 10 determines mimêsis to be a show of mere idols and concludes that it keeps company with the soul’s desirous part. In that case the pictorial quality of poetic mimêsis might be a distraction, its main fault residing in its illusionistic character.

The terminology in Book 9 underscores the connection between these arguments. The tyrant is “at the third remove” from the oligarch, his pleasure “a third-place idol [ tritôi eidôlôi ]” compared to the truth ( alêtheia ) of the oligarchic soul’s pleasure (587c). Meanwhile the oligarch’s soul stands third below the “kingly man [ tou basilikou ]” (587d). Only ten pages later Book 10 echoes this terminology when it calls the imitator “third from the king [ basileôs ] and from the truth [ alêtheias ]” (597e; cf. 602c). In other words, the language in Book 10 brings Book 9’s equation of base pleasures with illusory ones into its attack on art. If Book 10 can show that an art form fosters interest in illusions it will have gone a long way toward showing that the art form keeps company with irrational desires.

Another essential step in the argument is the recognition that what Book 3 acknowledged as an exception to its critique, namely the imitation of virtuous thoughtful characters, is not apt ever to take place. Socrates has tragedy in mind (comedy secondarily), and observes that playwrights neither know the quiet philosophical type nor profit from putting that nice type on stage before spectators who came to the theater to see something showily agitated (604e–605a). At one stroke Plato intensifies his condemnation of mimêsis , no longer a dangerous technique when it presents the wrong kinds of people but a technique that seldom presents any other kind.

Tragedy’s hero, who is inherently impulsive and impassioned, acts contrary to the dictates of reason. An illusion of virtue guides him. His son dies, and rather than save his tears for a private moment he lets them flow publicly and at length (603e–604a). The spectators’ reason is appalled; their other impulses rejoice (605c–e). They reckon that there is no harm in weeping along with the hero, enjoying an emotional release without the responsibility one feels in real-life situations. We grow accustomed not merely to feeling strong emotions, but to feeling them without the oversight of reason at work. This is how dramatic illusion induces bad habits of indulging the passions. The soul that had spent its life learning self-control sets about unlearning it.

Incidentally this argument turns on an assumption that Plato asserts without discussion, that mimêsis is the presentation or representation of characters (e.g. 603c; 605a, c). Although Book 10 sometimes speaks of mimêsis in other terms ( mimêsis of virtues: 600e), the argument about fostering passions requires that objects of poetic representation be humans. When what we call literary works practice what we call representation , Plato claims that they represent human beings. For him as for Aristotle drama presents prattontas “people doing things,” but where Aristotle emphasizes the things done, for Plato it is the people. Character is the essence of epic and drama. (Halliwell 1988 argues otherwise.)

Plato’s emphasis on character already predisposes him not to find philosophical worth in literature. The reason for mistrusting individual characters becomes explicit in Laws. A character speaks from a single point of view. Bring several characters together representing several idiosyncratic perspectives on the world and the very idea of deriving a general statement from the work becomes impossible ( Laws 719c–d). This situation is as it were the dramatic corollary to a general principle in mimêsis , that it represents plurality or multiplicity and so is forever indeterminate, undeterminable. Seeing the plurality of personages in a work as generative of its illusions might help to explain how poetry resembles paintings. But the analogy remains obscure.

Plato’s Sophist , often called a later work than the Republic , proposes its own account of mimêsis . It pursues imitation for the different purpose of defining what a sophist is. But the sophist—whom the main speaker calls an imitator ( mimêtês ) and sorcerer ( goêtês ) (235a)—is not far removed from the deceiving poet (Notomi 2011, 311–313).

And although the Sophist ’s theory of imitation diverges from the one in Republic 10, similarities between them preponderate. As the Republic does, the Sophist characterizes imitation mockingly as the creation of a whole world, and accuses imitation of misleading the unwary (234b–c), even if it also predicts more optimistically that people grow up to see through false likenesses (234d). Again as in Republic 10 imitation is contrasted with a god’s work—except that in the Sophist gods make all living things (265c–d) and also images, eidôla (266a): dreams, shadows, reflections.

The representation that Plato charges sophists with is fraudulent. It is the kind that makes not an honest likeness ( eikasia ) but an illusory image, a phantasma (235d–236b). Makers of realistic statues are attending not to what a human figure really looks like but to what looking at it is like. In drawing the distinction between these kinds of representations – a distinction that incidentally appears in no other dialogue (Halliwell 2021, 34) – the Sophist does strike a conciliatory tone not found in Republic 10. Here, it appears that a branch of the mimetic profession retains the power to produce a reliable likeness of an object. But the consolation proves fleeting. Reliable imitation plays no role in a definition of sophists, would presumably play no role in talk of poets either, and seems to make an appearance only for the purpose of being shuffled offstage as the excluded mimêsis , that which the imitation being talked about differs from.

The Sophist marginalizes positive imitation when it takes up mimêsis a second time, subdividing the production of illusions to identify a species in which imitators use their own voice and bodies: “This part is called imitation [ mimêsis ]” (267a). The Eleatic Stranger who is speaking recognizes that he has appropriated the general word for the specific act of enacting false images. We also notice that theatrical enactment becomes, on this analysis, a subset of pictorial image-making. “Let’s designate this to be what we call the imitative profession [ mimêtikon ].” Everything else in the large genus can go by some other name (267a).

Narrowing the process down to impersonation should make clear that Plato finds a sophist’s imitativeness to resemble a poet’s. Moreover this development neutralizes suggestions that mimêsis might have a good side. The imitative technê will have many manifestations, including those legitimate practices that the Statesman and other dialogues refer to. But the real work of mimêsis , the one that is worth defining and that applies to dominant art forms, is mendacious impersonation. Where Republic 3’s taxonomy made imitation look like a freakish variety of narration, this use of a word both generically and specially excludes good imitation as the exception and the problem case. Essentially speaking the art of mimêsis is a bad and lying art.

After all, as the Stranger says, there is a shortage of names for types of mimêsis . The ancients did not work hard enough making all relevant philosophical distinctions (267d). It is as if Plato were saying: “Colloquial language being loose, I will sometimes use mimêsis in the broader sense that contains epistemically sound practices, even though the core sense of the word is pejorative.”

This coverage of mimêsis in Plato will seem too strong in one respect and too weak or incomplete in another. It emphasizes core Platonic arguments about mimetic poetry. But the dialogues are far-ranging documents, and a reader discovers these core arguments among passages that argue to opposite effect, or deploying the vocabulary of mimêsis in contradictory ways.

For instance: If mimêsis brings about deceptive effects in the poetry about human beings, it also accounts for the visible universe, which Plato’s Timaeus calls an imitation of its intelligible model (39e; and see 44d) – and which, as already seen, that dialogue calls beautiful. For that matter human learning about the natural world also mimics an intelligible reality (47c, 80b) (Spinelli 2021). In the political domain, the Statesman calls existing constitutions mimêmata of moral truths, with no implication of fraud in them (297c). The funeral speech in the Menexenus urges the young to copy their elders’ virtues (236e). Such passages suggest a rehabilitation for the process that the Republic treats as counterfeiting (Robinson 2016).

Recent studies of Platonic mimêsis take the point further, as in a collection edited by Julia Pfefferkorn and Antonino Spinelli (2021). The contributors to that volume examine the appearances of mimêsis outside the “aesthetic” passages to which thought about the concept is usually confined, and they identify a variety of positive functions for the process. So mimêsis plays a role in recollection (Candiotto 2021), and in the ethical effort to assimilate oneself to the divine nature (Männlein-Robert 2021). Stephen Halliwell argues for the general point that “there is no unified and stable conception of mimesis to be found in Plato, let alone a uniformly negative conception” (Halliwell 2021, 29). The Republic ’s philosophers themselves engage in mimetic work, whether in embodying the spirit of the new city’s laws (485c) or when patterning themselves after what is most real (500c). We even find philosophers symbolically painting the good city (Halliwell 2021, Marrin 2023).

The complexity surrounding mimêsis may be hardest to sort out when humans are said to learn from nature. The beauty that Plato assigns to nature has been noted, and its place in the growth of knowledge. But there too mimêsis enters the picture. The Menexenus ’s speech goes so far as to affirm that women imitate the earth when they bear children (238a). The Timaeus ’s praise for seeing and studying the order in the skies describes the psychic betterment that comes of “copying” stellar movements with similar movements in one’s soul (47b–c).

Even in response to Book 10’s anti-poetic argument, a sympathetic reader might make the case that the poet’s error lies not in imitation per se , but in deploying that appealing technique without also, in the process, representing the true look of virtue.

A reading of the Republic ’s attack on imitation may silence many of the complicating objections by emphasizing that poetry goes wrong (in formal terms) only insofar as it operates not as simple mimêsis , but in particular the mimêsis of persons. Something about performing an individual’s part brings out the great ignorance and potential for corrupting souls, and the desirable types of mimêsis cited in the Republic and elsewhere tend to make the object of imitation something other than individual humans. This reply itself does have to admit objections, though, such as young philosophers’ efforts to act like upright and serious dialecticians (539c; see Menexenus 236e).

But insisting on the mimêsis of persons also invites broader systematic worries. Why should this one narrowly defined act of character-presentation fall prey to charges that it issues in images of appearance, when other mimetic acts avoid that charge? Just how is drama relevantly like painting when (for example) narrative is not?

Suppose that question does find an answer, and that mimetic poetry about individuals remains guilty of generating mere imitations of appearance. The Sophist ’s reference to divine copy-making then invites another worry, in the face of which this discussion of mimêsis can appear too weak. According to the Sophist , the images that gods produce in their kind of imitation are shadows and reflections, and the products of truly bad mimêsis are to be something worse than that. But what could be metaphysically lower than a shadow? Coming back to the Republic one finds shadows and reflections occupying the bottom-most domain of the Divided Line (510a). Where does poetic imitation belong on that ranking?

One may articulate the worry in the Republic ’s language. Shadows and reflections belong in the category of near ignorance. Imitation works an effect worse than ignorance, not merely teaching nothing but worse than that engendering a positive and perverse inclination toward ignorance. Plato observes that the ignorant prefer to remain as they are ( Symposium 204a), but this turn toward ignorance is different from such complacency. It suggests a wish to know less than one does.

The theoretical question also implies a practical one. If mimêsis poisons the soul, why do people swallow it? Plato’s attack on poetry saddles him with an aesthetic problem of evil.

Republic 10 shows signs of addressing the problem with the vocabulary of magic. Socrates begins by promising that insight into mimêsis operates as a countercharm (595b). People need countercharms because the imitator is a “sorcerer [ goêtês ],” therefore a deceiver (598d; cf. 602d). Earlier he said that sorcery robs people of knowledge (413b–c). Finally the indictment of Homer’s ignorance ends by saying his poetry casts a spell (601b). As the English “charm” does, this noun kêlêsis can mean “appeal” but also a conjuration. Poetry works magically to draw in the audience that it then degrades.

References to magic serve poorly as explanations but do indicate a need for explanation. Plato sees that some power must be drawing people to give up both knowledge and the taste for knowledge. What is striking about this deus ex machina explaining poetry’s attractiveness in the Republic is what it does not say. In other dialogues the magic of poetry is attributed to one version or another of divine inspiration. Odd that the Republic makes no reference to inspiration in poetry when dialogues as different as the Apology and the Laws mention it and the Ion and the Phaedrus spell out how it works. The Republic ’s only invocation of such an event pertains to philosophical education (499b). Odder still, Plato almost never cites imitation and divine inspiration together (the lone exception Laws 719c), as if to say that the two are incommensurable accounts of poetry. Will inspiration play a role ancillary to imitation, or do the two approaches to poetry have nothing to do with one another?

3. Divine Inspiration

In simplest form “inspiration” names the claim that poets are aided in producing their own poetry. At lucky moments a god takes them over and brings value to the poem that it could not have had otherwise.

That much is a common idea. Either a divine source provides the poet with information needed for writing the poem (information about past events or the gods’ lives, for example); or more generally the source gives the poet the talent needed for writing anything. The idea is far from original with Plato. Within Greek culture alone there are Homer and Hesiod before Plato, who begin their great works asking a Muse to “speak into” them; after him Aristotle ( Nicomachean Ethics 1099b9, 1179b20–23) (Büttner 2011). Plato will find new meanings in, and new uses for, an idea that has a cultural and religious meaning before him and a long traditional life after him (Ledbetter 2003, Murray 1981, Tigerstedt 1970).

Plato’s version of the idea has proved durable and influential. The old chestnut about a fine line between genius and insanity is only the best-known legacy of Platonic inspiration, as popularized in one way by Cesare Lombroso’s work on “psychiatric art” (Lombroso 1891, 2); in another way by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who translated the Ion in 1821 believing its account of poetic madness supported his own defense of poetry (Shelley 1840).

The topic occurs throughout Plato’s corpus. Platonic characters mention inspiration in dialogues as different as the Apology and the Laws . Socrates on trial tells of his frustrated effort to learn from poets. Their verses seemed excellent but the authors themselves had nothing to say about them ( Apology 22b). Socrates concludes that poets work instinctively and while inspired, enthousiazontes , as prophets and soothsayers also do ( theomanteis , chrêsmôidoi ), as opposed to writing on the basis of sophia (22c). The opposition between wisdom and inspiration does not condemn poets. They write by some nature ( phusei tini ), as if inspiration were a normally occurring human instinct.

For its part Laws 719c links the effects of inspiration to the nature of drama and its multiple perspectives:

When the poet sits on the Muse’s tripod [ en tôi tripodi tês Mousês ] he is not in his right mind [ emphrôn ] but ready to flow like a fountain; and because his profession [ technê ] is that of imitation [ mimêseôs ], then in creating people [ anthrôpous ] who are set against one another he is compelled to contradict himself frequently, and he does not know [ oiden ] whether these or the other thing of what he says are true [ alêthê ]. But it is not for a lawmaker to make two statements about a single topic in a law. (719c–d)

As in the Republic , mimêsis leaves the spectator bereft of either truths to evaluate or any wish to assess them. (It is, as there, the imitation of human beings.) As in the Apology , inspiration means the poet has no truths to transmit. When the god’s power comes the poet’s goes. Lawmakers work differently from that. And this contrast between inspiration and the origin of laws—occurring in a dialogue devoted to discovering the best laws for cities—hardly suggests an endorsement for inspiration.

But it is also true that the passage puts the poet on a tripod, i.e. the symbol of Apollo’s priestesses. Whatever brings a poet to write verse also draws divine wisdom out of priestesses; and Plato regularly defers to the authority of oracles. Even supposing that talk of inspiration denies individual control and credit to the poet, the priestess shows that credit and control are not all that matter. She does her best when her mind intrudes least on what she is saying. Her pronouncements have the prestige they do, not despite her loss of control, but because of it (Pappas 2012a). Her audience can trust the god speaking through her.

Another passage in the Laws attributes even reliable historical information to poets writing under the influence of the Muses and Graces (682a). Indeed the Laws overtly credit philosophical conversation to such inspiration (811c, with thanks to Kemal Batak for this reminder). The Meno makes inspiration its defining example of ignorant truth-speaking. Politicians, prophets, and soothsayers alike, “when inspired [ enthousiôntes ], speak truly [ alêthê ] about many things, but do not know what they are talking about” (99c). Socrates then calls prophets, soothsayers, and all poets theioi “divine” because of how well they speak without possessing knowledge (99c–d).

In these more tangential remarks, Plato seems to be affirming 1) that inspiration is really divine in origin, and 2) that this divine action that gives rise to poetry guarantees value in the result. It may remain the case that the poet knows nothing. But something good must come of an inspiration shared by poets and priestesses, and often enough that good is truth.

Plato’s shortest dialogue, the Ion may be the only one that all his readers would situate within aesthetics. It does not address poetry alone. The character Ion is a performer and interpreter of Homer’s poems, not a poet. Meanwhile, most of what are classed as arts today—painting, sculpture, music—appear in this dialogue as activities for which the problems of irrationality and knowledge signally fail to arise (532e–533c; for painting as technê cf. Gorgias 448c, Protagoras 312d). Nevertheless the Ion belongs in aesthetics by virtue of its focus on artistic inspiration, and the question it provokes of what inspiration implies about poetry’s merits.

As a rhapsode Ion travels among Greek cities reciting and explicating episodes from Homer. Between the recitation and the interpretation, such performances offered much latitude for displays of talent, and Ion’s talent has won him first prize at a contest in Epidaurus. (For some discussion of the rhapsode’s work see Gonzalez 2011, González 2013.)

Ion’s conversation with Socrates falls into three parts, covering idiosyncrasy (530a–533c), inspiration (533c–536d), and ignorance (536d–542b). Ion likes and understands only Homer; Homer composes, and Ion presents the Homeric composition, in a possessed state; and Homer doesn’t know the subjects he talks about, any more than Ion knows the subjects about which he quotes Homer. Both the first and the third sections support the claims made in the second, which should be seen as the conclusion to the dialogue, supported in different ways by the discussions that come before and after it. The idiosyncrasy in Ion’s attachment to Homer shows that Homer, and Ion because of him, function thanks to a divine visitation. But because Ion resists accepting the claim that he is deranged in his performances, Socrates presents a fallback argument. Ion is unqualified to assess any of the factual claims that appear in Homer, about medicine, chariot racing, or anything else. When Socrates compels him to choose between divine inspiration and a very drab brand of knowing nothing, Ion agrees to be called inspired.

This is to say that although poets’ and their readers’ ignorance – the subject of the dialogue’s final section – does emerge as a fact, it is nevertheless a fact in need of interpretation. The ignorance of poets and in poetry is never Plato’s last word. Whether ignorance means as in the Ion that the gods inspire poetry, or as in Republic 10 that imitative poetry imitates appearance alone, it matters less in itself than in its implications. Nor does ignorance alone demonstrate that poets are possessed. The proof of Ion’s ignorance supports inspiration but does not suffice to generate that doctrine.

The idiosyncrasy treated in this dialogue’s opening section, by comparison, is (for Plato) irrational on its face. The idiosyncrasy appears as soon as Socrates asks Ion about his technê (530b). That essential Platonic word has been mistranslated “art” or “craft.” “Skill” is not bad; but perhaps a technê most resembles a profession . The word denotes both a paying occupation and the possession of expertise. In Ion’s case Socrates specifies that the expertise for a rhapsode includes the ability to interpret poetry (530c). Ion rates himself superior to all his competitors at that task, but concedes that he can interpret only Homer (531a). Even though Homer and other poets sometimes address the same subjects, Ion has nothing to say about those others. He confesses this fact without shame or apology, as if his different responses reflected on the poets instead of on his talents. Something in Homer brings out Ion’s eloquence, and other poets lack that quality.

Socrates argues that one who knows a field knows it whole (531e–532a). This denial of the knowledge of particulars in their particularity also appears at Charmides 166e; Phaedo 97d; Republic 334a, 409d. It is not that what is known about an individual thing cannot transfer to other things of the same kind; rather that the act of treating an object as unique means attending to and knowing those qualities of it that do not transfer, and so knowing them as nontransferable qualities. This attitude toward particulars qua particulars is an obstacle to every theoretical expertise. It is the epistemic analogue to the irrational one-on-one erotic bond that Aristophanes describes in Plato’s Symposium (191c–d).

It may well be that what Ion understands about Homer happens to hold true of Hesiod. But if this is the case, Ion will not know it. He does not generalize from one to many poets, and generalizing is the mark of (what Socrates considers) a professional. Diotima’s speech in the Symposium supplies a useful comparison. She differentiates between love that clings to particular objects and a philosophical erôs that escapes its attachment to particulars to pursue general knowledge (210b). Ion’s investment in Homer, like the lover’s lowest grade of attachment, reveals (and also causes) an unwillingness to move toward understanding.

And so Ion presents Socrates with a conundrum. Although the man’s love for Homer prohibits him from possessing expertise, Socrates recognizes how well Ion performs at his job. How to account for success minus skill? Socrates needs to diagnose Ion by means of some positive trait he possesses, not merely by the absence of knowledge.

Socrates therefore speaks of poets and those they move as entheous . He elaborates an analogy. Picture an iron ring hanging from a magnet, magnetized so that a second ring hangs from the first and a third from that second one. Magnets are Muses, the rings attached to them poets, the second rings the poets’ interpreters, third the rhapsodes’ audiences. (For a recent treatment of this image see Wang 2016.)

Plato’s image captures the transfer of charisma. Each iron ring has the capacity to take on the charge that holds it. But the magnetism resides in the magnet, not in the temporarily magnetized rings. No ring is itself the source of the next ring’s attachment to it. Homer analogously draws poetic power from his Muse or god and attracts a rhapsode by means of borrowed power. Maybe in order to vest the great power in a paternal source superseding the Muses, Socrates shifts in the course of his analogy from casting the magnet-stone as feminine Muse (e.g. 533d–534c, 536a) to speaking of the masculine ho theos “the god,” perhaps to be identified with Apollo (534c–d, 536a). Whatever his source is, Ion once charged with Homer’s energy collects enthusiastic fans, as if to his own person and as if by technê —but, to be clear, only as if. The analogy lets poets and rhapsodes appear charismatic without giving them credit for their own charm.

Socrates takes a further step to pit inspiration against reason. “Epic poets who are good at all are never masters of their subject. They are inspired and possessed [ entheoi ontes kai katechomenoi ]” (533a). Inspiration now additionally means that poets are irrational, as it never meant before Plato. This superadded irrationality explains why Ion rejects Socrates’ proposal, in a passage that is frequently overlooked. He is not unhinged during his performances, Ion says; not katechomenos kai mainomenos , possessed and maddened (536d). Inspiration has come to imply madness and the madness in it is what Ion tries to reject.

What went wrong? The image of rings and magnets is slyer than it appeared. While the analogy rests transparently on one feature of magnetism, it also smuggles in a second. Socrates describes iron rings hanging in straight lines or branching. Although each ring may have more than a single ring dependent upon it, no ring is said to hang from more than one. But real rings hang in other ways, all the rings clumped against the magnet, or one ring clinging to two or three above it. Why does Socrates keep the strings of rings so orderly?

Here is one suggestion. Keeping Homer clung only to his Muse or god, and Ion clung only to Homer, preserves the idiosyncrasy that gave Socrates the excuse to deny expertise to Ion. Otherwise a magnet and rings would show how genuine knowledge is transmitted. Suppose you say that a Muse leads the doctor Hippocrates to diagnostic insights that he tells his students and they tell theirs. That much divine help is all that the image of magnet and rings strictly implies. It poses no threat to a profession’s understanding of itself. But no one would claim that a doctor can learn only from a single other doctor, or that a doctor treats a unique group of adulatory patients. That constraint on medical practice would threaten its status as technê ; and that is exactly the constraint added by the array of rings as Socrates describes it. (For a contrasting and compelling reading of this passage, see Chapter 3 of Capra 2015.)

Analogies always introduce new traits into the thing being described. But Plato’s readers should become suspicious because the feature that slips into this figure, the orderly hanging of the rings, is neither called for by the way iron actually transmits magnetic force, nor neutral in effect. Plato has distorted magnetism to make it mean not inspiration simpliciter but something crazy.

The combination of possession and madness in the Ion ’s version of inspiration makes it hard to decide whether the dialogue registers some approval for inspired poetry or condemns it entirely. Readers have drawn opposite morals from this short work. (On this controversy see Stern-Gillet 2004.) As Socrates characterizes enthousiasmos , it denies Ion’s professional credibility, not to mention his sanity. But there is religion to think of. If not traditionally pious, Plato is also not the irreverent type who would ascribe an action to divinities in order to mock it. And consider the example of inspired verse mentioned here. Socrates cites Tynnichus, author of only one passable poem, which was a tribute to the Muses (534d). It’s as if the Muses wanted to display their power, Socrates says, by proving that their intervention could elicit a good poem even from an unskilled author. If this is Socrates’ paradigm of inspired poetry, then whatever else inspiration also explains, it appears particularly well suited to producing praise of the gods. And praise of the gods is the poetic form that Plato respects and accepts ( Republic 607a).

Finally there is a version of the same problem that arose regarding the Apology , Laws , and Meno , that the Ion calls soothsayers and diviners possessed ( chrêsmôidos, mantis : 534d). That already seems to justify inspiration. Add in that Socrates calls the diviner’s practice a technê (538e; cf. 531b) and this dialogue seems to be saying that an activity can be both professional and the result of divine possession.

So what does the charge of madness mean? The word makes Ion recoil—but what does he know about higher states of understanding? Maybe madness itself needs to be reconceived. The Ion says far from enough to settle the question. But Plato’s other sustained discussion of inspiration returns to the language of madness and finds some forms of it permissible, even philosophical.

When introducing the Phaedrus ’s major speech on erôs (244a–250d), Socrates defines desirous love as a species of mania , madness, in a context that comments on philosophy and poetry with an aside about mimêsis a few pages later.

Madness comes in two general forms: the diseased state of mental dysfunction, and a divergence from ordinary rationality that a god sometimes brings (265a–b). The first is a passing fit of possession, the other the encompassing condition of someone’s soul (with thanks here to Joshua Wilner). The divine latter condition subdivides into love, Dionysian frenzy, oracular prophecy, and poetic composition (244b–245a). In all four cases the possessed or inspired person ( enthousiazôn : 241e, 249e, 253a, 263d) can accomplish what is impossible for someone in a sane state. All four cases are associated with particular deities and traditionally honored.

On reconciling the possession described in the Ion with that in the Phaedrus , see Gonzalez 2011 for extended discussion. Briefly we can say that the madness of the Phaedrus is separated from ordinary madness as the Ion ’s version is not, and is classified pointedly as good derangement. Bad kinds exist too. But, being a god, Eros can’t do anything bad (242d–e). The greatest blessings flow from divine mania (244a).

The Phaedrus does not associate the possessed condition with idiosyncrasy. To account for the madness of love Socrates describes an otherworldly existence in which souls ride across the top of heaven enjoying direct visions of the Forms (247c–d). After falling into bodily existence a soul responds to beauty more avidly than it does to any other qualities for which there are Forms.

Associating beauty with certain cases of inspiration suggests that poetry born of inspiration might also have philosophical worth. But before welcoming the lost sheep Plato back to the poetry-loving fold, recognize the Phaedrus ’s qualifying remarks about which poetry one may now prize. It cannot be imitative. When Socrates ranks human souls depending on how much otherworldly being they saw before falling into bodily form—philosophers come in first on this ranking—the poet or other mimêtikos occupies sixth place out of nine (248e).

Indeed the argument of the Phaedrus only identifies a single type of poem that the Muses call forth: the poem that “embellishes thousands of deeds of the ancients to educate [ paideuei ] later generations” (245a). But Plato exempts hymns to gods and encomia of heroes from even his harshest condemnation of poetry ( Republic 607a). Quite compatibly with the Republic ’s exemption the Ion specifies a hymn to the Muses as its example of inspiration and the Phaedrus describes the praise of heroes. Whenever possible Plato reserves the benefits of inspiration for the poems he does not have reason to condemn. And this restriction on which poems derive a true merit from being inspired leaves inspiration a long way from guaranteeing value for poetry as a whole.

Mimêsis fails, when it does, in two ways. 1) It originates in appearance rather than in reality, so that judged on its own terms the product of imitation has an ignoble pedigree ( Republic 603b). 2) The imitative arts positively direct a soul toward appearances, away from proper objects of inquiry. A mirror reflection might prompt you to turn around and look at the thing being reflected, but an imitation keeps your eyes on the copy alone.

Although the dialogues offer few arguments for the second claim, the perverseness with which mimêsis leads one to prefer appearance partly follows from a contrast between traditional visual art and its later developments. Aeschylus had allegedly praised the religiosity of the rougher old visual forms, by comparison with later visually exciting statues that inspired less of a sense of divinity (Porphyry On Abstinence from Animal Food 2.18). Early votive objects, sometimes no more representational than a plank or oblong stone, were treated as markers of the gods’ presence and points of contact with unseen powers (Faraone 1992, Collins 2003). Stone and wooden figures could serve as surrogates for absent humans, as when mourners buried an effigy in place of an irrecoverable body (Herodotus Histories 6.58; Vernant 2006, 322; Bremmer 2013), or treated a grave marker as if it were the buried person (Euripides Alcestis 348–356; see Burkert 1985, 193–194). Whereas the mimetic relationship connects a visible likeness with its visible original, such objects though visible link to invisible referents.

Plato seems to distinguish between the pious old art and its modernized forms, as he distinguishes analogously among poems. Statues suggest communication with divinities ( Laws 931a, Phaedrus 230b). Wax likenesses participate in the magic of effigies ( Laws 933b). Metaphorically the dialogues imagine a body as a statue that invites comparison with its invisible referent the soul ( Charmides 154c, 157d–158c; Symposium 215b, 216d–e), or as a sêma “tomb” but also “sign” of the soul within ( Cratylus 400b–c, Gorgias 493a). Compared to such referential relations, the mimetic art object’s reference to what is visible can feel like a forcible misdirection of attention to appearances and to delight with visibility as such.

Beauty by comparison begins in the domain of intelligible objects, since there is a Form of beauty. And more than any other property for which a Form exists, beauty engages the soul and draws it toward philosophical deliberation, toward thoughts of absolute beauty and subsequently (as we imagine) toward thoughts of other concepts.

It has been noted that some appearances of mimêsis give it a role to play in philosophizing, as when recollecting the Forms or assimilating oneself to the divine nature. This constructive turn does not seem to be made available to the poems or paintings that imitate individual human beings. If one seeks something in poetry and the arts that would function oppositely to mimetic poetry and would serve philosophical enlightenment, inspiration might offer the most promising possibility.

A significant datum here comes from the Republic , which despite its stance against much poetry still draws from notable poems in its argument. The “noble lie” (414b–415d), by means of which Socrates proposes to teach future citizens the differences among them, reworks the Hesiodic “ages of humanity” from Works and Days (107–179). Hesiod must have understood something important about people that the Republic ’s city will turn into its civic lesson (Van Noorden 2010). And Geoffrey Bakewell has shown how the appearances of verses from Aeschylus progress, as the Republic goes on, to form good advice to the city and its control over music. Seven against Thebes “deserves a place in Kallipolis” (Bakewell 2017, 274).

Where Hesiod is concerned one may multiply examples from the Symposium and Critias, but most of all from Plato’s Timaeus , that show the dialogues engaged with that great archaic poet as interlocutor and source (Boys-Stones and Haubold 2010). Plato could credit the wisdom in such poems to the inspiration that had fallen upon their authors.

Does such wisdom as good poetry contains necessarily come from the domain of Forms? The Phaedrus comes closest to saying so, both by associating the gods with Forms (247c–e), and by rooting inspired love in recollection (251a). But this falls short of showing that the poets’ divine madness likewise originates among objects of greater reality. It might, but does not have to.

It has been argued that because reason plays a role for Plato in predictive dreaming (see Timaeus 71e–72a), reason is therefore also at work in cognitive states that resemble the inspired condition of the soothsayer. Given such resemblance, the function of reason in predictive dreaming would imply a role for reason whenever inspiration comes (Büttner 2011). Yet the dialogues never speak of dreaming on a par with mantic prophecy. Socrates speaks twice of his own dreams in the dialogues and expects to find truth in them ( Crito 44b, Phaedo 60e–61a), but does not equate his dreaming with a possessed condition.

The Ion says less about poetry’s divine origins than the Phaedrus does, certainly nothing that requires an interpreter to discover Forms within the Muse’s magnetism. Laws 682a and Meno 99c–d credit the inspired condition with the production of truths, even in poetry. Neither passage describes the truths about Forms that philosophical dialectic would lead to, but that might be asking too much. Let it suffice that inspiration originates in some truth.

What about the effects of inspired poetry? Could such poetry turn a soul toward knowledge as beautiful faces do? The Phaedrus does say that Muse-made poems teach future generations about the exploits of heroes. Inspired poetry at least might set a good example. But one can find good examples in verse without waiting for inspiration. Even Republic 3 allows for instances in which the young guardians imitate virtuous characters.

A clear opposition between imitation and inspiration, or any clear relationship between them, would suggest a coherent whole that can be titled “Plato’s aesthetics.” In the absence of such a relationship it is hard to attribute an aesthetic theory to Plato as one can straightforwardly do with Aristotle.

If unification is possible for the elements of Plato’s aesthetics, that may arrive from another direction. Religion has not been explored as much as it should in connection with Plato’s aesthetics, even though a religious orientation informs what he has to say about beauty, inspiration, and imitation. The quasi-divine status that beauty has in the Symposium ; the Republic ’s characterization of the imitator as enemy to Athena and other gods; and of course inspiration, which cannot be defined without appeal to divine action: All three subjects suggest that Plato’s aesthetics might come together more satisfactorily within Plato’s theology. The question is worth pursuing now, for scholarship of recent decades has advanced the study of Greek religion, providing the resources for a fresh inquiry into the fundamental terms out of which Plato constructs his aesthetics.

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• Nehamas, Alexander, and Paul Woodruff (trans.), 1989. Plato: Symposium , with introduction and notes, Indianapolis: Hackett.
• ––– (trans.), 1995. Plato: Phaedrus , with introduction and notes, Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Notomi, Noburu, 2011. “Image-Making in Republic X and the Sophist : Plato’s Criticism of the Poet and the Sophist,” in Destrée and Herrmann 2011, pp. 299–326.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 1980. “Aristophanes and Socrates on Learning Practical Wisdom,” Yale Classical Studies , 26: 433–97.
• Pappas, Nickolas, 1989. “Plato’s Ion : The problem of the author,” Philosophy , 64: 381–389.
• –––, 1999. “ Mimêsis in Aristophanes and Plato,” Philosophical Inquiry , 21: 61–78.
• –––, 2012a. “Plato on Poetry: Imitation or Inspiration?” Philosophy Compass , 10: 1–10.
• –––, 2012b. Review of James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 70: 323–326.
• –––, 2013. “The Impiety of the Imitator in Republic 10,” Epoché , 17: 219–232.
• –––, 2015. “Women at the Gymnasium and Consent for the Republic ’s City,” Dialogos , 98: 27–54.
• Partee, Morriss Henry, 1971. “Inspiration in the Aesthetics of Plato,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 30: 87–95.
• Petraki, Zacharoula, 2018. “Plato’s Metaphor of ‘Shadow Painting’: Antithesis and ‘Participation’ in the Phaedo and the Republic ,” Classical Journal , 114(1): 1–33.
• Pfefferkorn, Julia and Antonino Spinelli (eds.), 2021. Platonic Mimesis Revisited , Baden-Baden: Academia Verlag.
• Philip, J. A., 1961. “Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association , 92: 453–468.
• Politis, Vasilis, 2021. Plato’s Essentialism: Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Porter, James I., 2010. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Pretzler, Maria, 2007. Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece , London: Bloomsbury.
• Robinson, T. M., 2016. “Plato and the Arts,” in Benitez and Wang 2016, pp. 13–24.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1840. “A Defense of Poetry,” in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (ed.), Letters from Abroad, Translations, and Fragments , London: Edward Moxon, 1840.
• Sider, David, 1977. “Plato’s Early Aesthetics: The Hippias Major ,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 35: 465–470.
• Sörbom, Göran, 1966. Mimesis and Art , Bonniers: Scandinavian University Books.
• Spinelli, Antonino, 2021. “ Mimoumenoi tas tou theou periphoras . Die Mimesis des Kosmos als menschliche Aufgabe im Timaios ,” in Pfefferkorn and Spinelli 2021, pp. 291–312.
• Stern-Gillet, Suzanne, 2004. “On (Mis)interpreting Plato’s Ion ,” Phronesis , 49: 169–201.
• Tarrant, Dorothy, 1927. “The Authorship of the Hippias Major ,” Classical Quarterly , 21(2): 82–87.
• Tigerstedt, Eugene, 1969. Plato’s Idea of Poetical Inspiration , Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
• –––, 1970. “ Furor Poeticus : Poetic inspiration in Greek literature before Democritus and Plato,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 31: 163–178.
• Van Noorden, Helen, 2010. “‘Hesiod’s Races and Your Own’: Socrates’ ‘Hesiodic’Project,” in Boys-Stones and Haubold 2010, pp. 176–199.
• Verdenius, Willen Jacob, 1962. Mimesis: Plato’s doctrine of artistic imitation and its meaning to us , Leiden: Brill.
• Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 2006. “The Figuration of the Invisible and the Psychological Category of the Double: The Kolossos,” in Myth and Thought among the Greeks , Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort (trans.), New York: Zone Books, pp. 321–332.
• Wang, Shuanghong, 2016. “The Muses’ Rhapsode: The Analogy of the Magnetic Stone in Plato’s Ion ,” in Benitez and Wang 2016, pp. 137–150.
• White, F. C., 1989. “Love and Beauty in Plato’s Symposium ,” Journal of Hellenic Studies , 109: 149–157.
• Woodruff, Paul, 1982. “What Could Go Wrong with Inspiration? Why Plato’s poets fail,” in Moravcsik and Temko 1982, pp. 137–150.
• Woodruff, Paul (trans.), 1983. Plato, Two Comic Dialogues: Ion and Hippias Major , with introduction and notes, Indianapolis: Hackett.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Fine, Jonathan, 2024. “Of Pots and Plato’s Aesthetics,” unpublished manuscript.
• Taylor Kloha Sandidge, “ What the Poet Doesn’t Need to Know: Another Look at Plato’s Expulsion of Tragedy ,” unpublished manuscript. [A fresh discussion of the issues in Book 10 of the Republic .]
• The Perseus Project , Tufts University; a collection of ancient writings on line. Plato’s works in both Greek in English with any number of linguistic and scholarly tools.
• Maecenas: Images of Ancient Greece and Rome , was formerly hosted at SUNY/Buffalo, now available at the Internet Archive.
• DMOZ Directory , meta-source no longer updated. It’s a guide to over 100 sites in ancient philosophy. These vary in richness but make many resources available, some of them appropriate for beginners and others for advanced scholars.
• Plato and Aristotle on Tragedy , a fine outline of the issues that Plato and Aristotle address in speaking of tragedy; a greater focus on tragedy in particular than in the present entry.

-->aesthetics: and the philosophy of art --> | Aristotle | beauty | Plato | Plato: ethics and politics in The Republic | Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology | Plato: rhetoric and poetry | Plato: shorter ethical works

Acknowledgments

Parts of section 1 were informed and guided by the work of Jonathan Fine. Parts of 2.3 and 2.5 are indebted to arguments made by Taylor Kloha (specifically, on what a full and true account of something requires and how the poet’s error lies not in imitating per se but in doing so without representing the full and true account). I am also grateful to Elvira Basevich, Daniel Mailick, and Andrea Tisano for their help with earlier versions of this entry. And special thanks go to Joshua Wilner for his comments and assistance.

Copyright © 2024 by Nickolas Pappas < nickolaspappas60 @ gmail . com >

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Philosophical Quotes on Beauty

• Philosophical Theories & Ideas
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• Ph.D., Philosophy, Columbia University
• M.A., Philosophy, Columbia University
• B.A., Philosophy, University of Florence, Italy

Beauty is one of the most intricate and fascinating topics of philosophical discussion. It has been taken up in relation to a host of other subjects, such as truth, the good, the sublime, and pleasure. Here is a selection of quotes on beauty, divided into different themes.

Beauty and Truth

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all \ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." (John Keats, One on a Grecian Urn , 1819) "Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated." ( Albert Einstein , My Credo , 1932) "The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness because it affords a greater temptation to the ego." (Northrop Frye, Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype , 1957) "I must not say that she was true | Yet let me say that she was fair | And they, that lovely face who view | They should not ask if truth be there." (Matthew Arnold, Euphrosyne ) "Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart." (Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos ) "O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem | By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!" ( William Shakespeare , Sonnet LIV) "If truth is beauty how come nobody has their hair done in a library?" (Lily Tomlin, American comedian)

Beauty and Pleasure

"'Tis impious pleasure to delight in harm. And beauty should be kind, as well as charm." (George Granville, To Myra ) "Beauty is pleasure objectified — pleasure regarded as the quality of an object" (George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty ) "The roses of pleasure seldom last long enough to adorn the brow of him who plucks them; for they are the only roses which do not retain their sweetness after they have lost their beauty." (Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, On Dissipation )

Beauty and the Sublime

"Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt." (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment ) "What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly, it leads to resignation." (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation ) "When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene." (Jane Austen, Mansfield Park ) "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we everyday experience." (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ) "A thing of beauty is a joy forever | Its loveliness increases; it will never |Pass into nothingness; but still will keep | A bower quiet for us, and a sleep |Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing." (John Keats)

• What Is the 'Ladder of Love' in Plato's 'Symposium'?
• How Do Philosophers Think About Beauty?
• Philosophical Quotes on Violence
• Philosophical Quotes on Lying
• Quotes About Friendship From Some of the Greatest Thinkers in Time
• The Paradox of Tragedy
• 10 Tips for Understanding Philosophical Texts
• What Is Philosophy?
• Rationalism in Philosophy
• Philosophy of Food
• Early Modern Philosophy
• The 5 Great Schools of Ancient Greek Philosophy
• The Philosophy of Honesty
• René Descartes' "Proofs of God's Existence"
• The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque
• Philosophy of Culture

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Reason, Morality, and Beauty: Essays on the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant

Bindu Puri and Heiko Sievers (eds.), Reason, Morality, and Beauty: Essays on the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant , Oxford University Press, 2007, 191pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195683935.

Reviewed by Charles Goodman, Binghamton University

This volume, a commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Kant's death, is an ambitious attempt to explore the global significance of Kant's thought and investigate the historical influence and continuing relevance of his ideas in relation to both analytic and continental philosophical projects and both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions.   It contains contributions from authors representing many regions of the globe, including India, China, Germany, Turkey, Indonesia, and the United States.   Given the significance of the tasks which the volume undertakes, and the commendable broadness of its outlook, it is unfortunate that its level of quality is so uneven.   Although some of the essays are quite interesting, others have little to offer readers with even a basic familiarity with the literature on Kant.

The quality of editing on display in this book is not up to the usual high standards of Oxford University Press.   A number of the essays suffer from deficiencies in style and errors in grammar.   The chapter by Bindu Puri has particularly severe problems of this kind, including the unintentionally humorous misplacement of commas (p. 60), grammatical problems which lead to a lack of clarity (as at p. 63), and an incorrect reference to the title of a well-known work (p. 70).   Even those essays in the volume which are well-written could still benefit from a bit more proofreading.

By far the most impressive article in the volume is the contribution of Jonathan Dancy.   Dancy's other work can often be so technical and difficult as to be almost impenetrable, but this essay is commendably clear.   In it, he confronts one of the strongest objections against his particularist view of ethics, and does so in a careful, frank and stimulating way.   The objection starts from the observation that moral claims don't seem to be a posteriori , since they aren't confirmed in the same straightforwardly empirical way as scientific assertions or everyday reports about perceptible objects.   Since the division between a priori and a posteriori exhausts the domain of assertions, moral claims must be a priori .   This conclusion would make sense on a view where morality derives from one general principle such as Kant's Categorical Imperative.   But particularists such as Dancy deny that morality depends on principles in this way; they affirm that morality is a vast field of independent, specific truths that depend sensitively on the details of the contexts in which they apply.   So, as Dancy puts it, "the particularist is left in the uncomfortable position of holding that some contingent and particular truths can be known a priori " (p. 43).

Dancy's main response to the objection is to assert that certain judgments of similarity, such as the assertion that "Mozart's music is more like Haydn's than Beethoven's is like Bach's," are synthetic, a priori , particular, and contingent.   Thus, moral judgments are not the only ones that possess all four of these seemingly incompatible types of status (pp. 50-51).   The most difficult part of this case to make is that the judgments of similarity, while being known a priori , are also contingent.   For as Dancy points out, it seems that there are two different, closely related types of propositions involved in these judgments.   We might say that any music exactly like Haydn's, whoever happened to have written it, would be very similar to any music exactly like Mozart's; and this would be a necessary truth.   Or we might say that the music Haydn in fact happened to write was quite similar to the music Mozart in fact wrote, and this claim would clearly be contingent.   It seems that if one of these assertions is known a priori , it will be the first, not the second.

Dancy responds to this difficulty with another example:

I don't think this challenge is sound.   It is a necessary truth that Mark, given his actual height, is taller than Jonathan, given his actual height.   But the necessity of that truth is compatible with its being a stubbornly contingent truth that Mark is taller than Jonathan.   The necessary truth is a consequence of the contingent one, and, I would say, known only by knowing the contingent one.   (p. 51)

This example is an unfortunate one for Dancy's case, since there are principles that apply to heights: namely, the principles of arithmetic.   If Mark is six feet tall and Jonathan is five feet tall, then the relation between their heights is a consequence of the universal and necessary truth that anyone who is six feet tall is taller than anyone who is five feet tall.   In some cases, our knowledge of both the particular necessary truth and the particular contingent truth that Dancy cites in the quote could be dependent on our knowledge of this universal necessary truth.

The example of similarities between entire lifetimes of musical compositions is obviously vastly more complex.   But Kant, if we imagine him as Dancy's opponent, could certainly claim that we judge Mozart and Haydn to be similar by noting certain specific respects in which they are similar, and that we are therefore applying a complex body of universal a priori knowledge.   Dancy would reply that judgments about similarity are too inherently contextual to be reduced to any set of principles, no matter how complex.   But surely at least some of the claims we could make about the similarities between Mozart and Haydn are instances of true universal principles.   Perhaps whatever is objectively true about these similarities can be captured in such principles; whatever cannot be so captured may be traceable to the subjective tastes of each individual.   And if so, then Dancy cannot use the example of similarity to illuminate the moral case.   He will not have dispelled the sheer strangeness of imagining that a vast, messy, uncodifiable body of particular judgments could nevertheless be known a priori .

For these reasons, I am doubtful that Dancy's main argument succeeds.   Along with this important argument, however, he also presents a number of other highly interesting remarks.   For example, he deftly refutes the argument that since moral judgments must govern the behavior of all rational beings, they must therefore be universal in form.   He does this by pointing out that a conditional rule can apply over a large domain of quantification, even though only a small subset of the domain satisfies the antecedent of the conditional.   He also strikes at the heart of many recent reconstructions of Kant through his bold claim that "Kant was not trying to capture the idea of a moral reason" (p. 41).   Dancy's essay by itself is almost sufficient to justify the purchase of the entire book.

Reason, Morality, and Beauty contains several historical essays that do a good job of expounding the views of Kant and other thinkers, but make little original contribution.   This is true of the first chapter, by Sharad Deshpande, on the relation between Kant and the tradition of virtue ethics.   Deshpande does attempt a reconciliation between Kant and Aristotle, but recognizes that although the issues that concern them are often similar, they differ in their conceptions of the role of reason in the moral life.   The second chapter, by Goutam Biswas, is especially poorly written with little critical bite, juxtaposing Kant with various Continental figures, but without much of a philosophical payoff.   The essay by Xie Dikun is greatly superior in the quality of its writing style.   It expounds various neo-Kantian positions and discusses a large number of philosophers, but without doing much intellectual work with them or improving our understanding of Kant in any significant way.

Bindu Puri, one of the editors of the volume, contributes an article which seeks to criticize Kant's views about happiness and friendship from an Aristotelian perspective.   Although I sympathize with the general thrust of his remarks, I fear that the essay has significant defects both in organization and in argumentation.   On p. 59, Puri offers some expressions of disagreement with Kant's critique of pathological love that don't engage with the motivations behind that critique, as they are expounded by such recent interpreters as Allen Wood.   One particularly flawed argument appears on p. 56, where we read: "Also, if happiness has no role to play in making men good, it is difficult to say that friendship, which has certain complex but decisive influences on happiness, can be constitutive of that human good."   On p. 70, Puri makes a valuable point about the potential importance of moral correction that friends can offer us; but this point is intended as a criticism of Kant, and it is unclear whether Kant would have any reason to disagree with it.

Bijoy Boruah's essay, "Autonomy and the Virtue of Self-Legislation," is the best of the purely historical essays.   Boruah offers a thoughtful and well-written examination of the relation, in Kant's philosophy, between causality and freedom, and between sensual impulse and rational will.   The chapter sets out these extremely difficult issues in a clear and interesting way.

Several essays in the volume attempt to do comparative philosophy, bringing Kant into dialogue with non-Western traditions.   Goenawan Mohamad, in his essay on "The Difficulty of the Subject," discusses a wide variety of themes, including Kant's views on freedom and on the Enlightenment, Adorno's response to them, and the work of the Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar.   In the process, he makes an intriguing suggestion: "As I will argue in the later part of this essay, strangely the Muslim revivalist's challenge to the Enlightenment project, like the one proclaimed by Sayyed Qutb, ends up creating a problem just like the Kantian Enlightenment did" (p. 105).   But this bold promise is only partly kept, and these themes deserve a fuller development than they can receive in an essay that attempts so much.

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann's paper is entitled "'Religion and Public Reasoning': Enlightenment and Critical Deliberation on Religion in Western and Islamic Societies Today."   Lutz-Bachmann makes some suggestions about the proper role of religion in public life that are well worth discussing, and which are highly relevant to dialogue between Western and Islamic philosophers and to the dilemmas posed by Muslim minorities in secular European countries.   However, he says much less about Islam in particular than his title seems to promise.   Moreover, this article might have benefited from a discussion of the extensive reflections on the issue of public reason developed by Rawls and his followers.   But it is nevertheless a helpful contribution to an urgent issue of our times.

Hülya Yetisken presents some interesting remarks about the relation between certain of Kant's views about education and the actual system of education implemented by Ioanna Kuçuradi at the Hacettepe University.   Yetisken's essay succeeds in showing that the distinctive approach of this university can indeed be seen as a realization of certain Kantian ideas.   But she makes claims to uniqueness which are a bit too strong.   As Yetisken writes on p. 81, "So far as I know and I was able to inquire, Kuçuradi's view is the first, and perhaps the only one, which puts in connection philosophical knowledge related to ethical value problems with concrete examples of the same problems that we find in works of art."   However, the Confucian system of education in premodern China stressed the importance of poetic and historical texts in developing the character of students and providing them with examples for emulation.   The role of literary and historical examples in moral education is prominently on display, for instance, in the writings of Mencius.

The article by A. Raghuramaraju sets out to discuss the problem of the unknowability of the self in Kantian philosophy and to critique the approach to that problem offered by Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya.   Bhattacharyya had attempted to resolve Kant's difficulty by drawing on the tradition of Advaita Vedanta.   In view of the fact that the classical Indian philosophical tradition came to focus intensely on the questions of whether a self exists and how we can know about it, the topic Raghuramaraju chooses to discuss would seem to have a great deal of potential.   Unfortunately, this author ends up accomplishing little more than offering an example of how not to do comparative philosophy.

The problems that beset this article are considerably deeper than its defects of style.   They go beyond Raghuramaraju's references to "the somnolentness of modernity" (p. 141) and to Descartes' views about the "penal gland" (p. 135).   In particular, Raghuramaraju's explanation of Bhattacharyya's views is unclear, inelegant and poorly written.   At p. 143, moreover, he makes some sweeping claims about the role of the self in ancient thought.   Though his claims may be correct, the argument offered for them is very weak, as it depends on a nearly irrelevant quote from Aristotle and the bizarre assertion that, for Aristotle, "pair is prior to the individual."   Raghuramaraju also cites Aquinas' presentation of the cosmological argument, and puts great weight on an analogy between Aquinas' God, who is an unmoved mover, and Kant's self, which is an unknown knower.   But this analogy, as he articulates it, is both tenuous and forced.   Moreover, he entirely ignores Kant's critique of the cosmological argument.

On pages 146 and 147, Raghuramaraju quotes a large amount of material from primary and secondary sources about classical Indian philosophy.   Some of this material is interesting and could have been used to make a real contribution to the issue, while some is of quite dubious relevance.   But Raghuramaraju makes virtually no effort to discuss the implications of any of the quotations, or to develop any conclusions that might be of philosophical interest.   Comparative philosophy both can, and must, be done in a more professional and intellectually serious manner.

The volume concludes with two valuable chapters the starting points of which are Kant's aesthetics.   Martin Seel's essay does much to clarify and challenge some recent ideas in the philosophy of art, which he juxtaposes with Kant's views.   The essay tests these ideas in relation to several works of modern art which are quite clearly and vividly described.   Andrea Esser's chapter boldly argues for a much closer similarity than one would have expected between the aesthetic views of Kant and Marcel Duchamp.   She seeks to illuminate both the surprising relevance and the limitations of Kant's aesthetic theory as applied to the world of modern art.

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OCR A Level Religion Ethics and Philosophy essay plans for every topic + possible question

Subject: Philosophy and ethics

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

3 September 2024

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I made these essay plans as my way of revising and then simply memorised them by rewriting them on my whiteboard/ blurting which is how i achieved an A* and one of the highest marks in the country. The plans include information from textbooks, online websites and niche information found via exterior sources + my teacher Each plan is colour coded with key words, key scholars, for and against paragraphs (ie argument 1 - critisism - rebuttal - defence) The plans are very detailed, some in the DCT section have summaries beneath them but i didnt do this for all I would recommend reading and editing them with your own knowledge/ information if you want to and then just memorising them Message me if you would like to buy specific ones or only one out of religion ethics and philosophy and i can relist for a lower price Also feel free to message me if you would like any other tips on this subject as it is one of the hardest alevels and there isnt much guidance online

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